Virtual Selling On-Demand: Automating Demos, Follow-Ups and Digital Interactions

Not all virtual selling will take place over scheduled meetings. In fact, a good deal of opportunities will take place without direct interaction from a sales representative.

Winning by Design’s Jacco van der Kooij calls these opportunities “Meetingless Interactions” and they encompass basically any sort of digital interaction between a representative and a buyer that doesn’t require communication at a predetermined time or place.

Meetingless interactions can be understood as simply on-demand experiences that include any digital touchpoint a seller creates for a buyer to respond to. Emails and chatbots are good examples, but experiences can also include specialized landing pages, pre-recorded demos and content hubs designed for a particular account.

Creating and curating these digital experiences is essential to virtual selling.

By providing more touchpoints for an account, a sales representative can provide more educational resources, more content and more guidance to more buying committee members than they would in a one-off meeting.

By providing more on-demand opportunities to interact, the sales organization can increase its selling opportunities to 24/7, creating a compounding effect on conversions and increasing win rates.

So, what can the sales organization do to set up these systems of engagement for virtual selling? Here are a few best practices to keep in mind.

Assess the on-demand experience and meet with marketing

List out the assets available to sales to create on-demand experiences. These can include pre-recorded videos, webinars, specialized landing pages, chatbots and email sequences.

Then meet with the marketing team to discuss how to optimize these assets to scale to sales’ needs. Items to discuss include:

• • Design best practices for experiences
  • Chatbot copy and targeting
  • How sales can use customer branding to inform an experience
  • Relevant content needs

Once sales and marketing agree on fundamental best practices for on-demand experiences, it’s time to actually set the experience up.

Usually, creating an account-specific experience will be a joint effort between marketing and sales, but the sales team can also set these experiences up if they’re familiar with the technology and can conform to brand guidelines.

Work with your marketing team to develop templates for your webinars, content hubs, resource pages and decks. Using templates helps to cut down on production time and helps you to create better digital experiences for prospects.

Personalize On-Demand Experiences

There are a lot of benefits to creating on-demand digital experiences while virtual selling. One of those benefits is that you can pre-record educational videos and demos to connect with various members of a buying committee. If you have a high-profile account you want to win, it may be worthwhile to sit down and record personalized demos for on-demand consumption.

Here are a few things you can do to make a demo more relevant to an account and a buying committee member:

• • Make use of the account’s logo in the banner of the demo and any landing pages designed for the account
  • Tell the account the demo is available on-demand — and that any questions asked through during the demo will be answered
  • Update demos with new, relevant content as it becomes available
  • Consolidate your resources into a specialized landing page and share it with the buying committee

If you’re ever uncertain about the quality of a demo or experience, turn to your marketing team and ask them for help. They should be able to provide you with better customer logos, assets and more.

Encourage Digital Engagement

With on-demand experiences in place (and integrated with your CRM), you’re ready to make the most out of “meetingless interactions.”

When you do so, make sure your account knows it can connect directly with you. Make sure you:

• • Highlight engagement opportunities at key touchpoints – After an initial kick-off call, let your account know it can find more information by visiting a specialized landing page, a demo or to reach out to you over email or a chatbot.
  • Create additional content – Buyers will have questions. Make sure you answer those questions in one or two formats. While email is fine, recording a short video showing a solution and sharing that video an account-specific experience is better.
  • Ask for feedback – Using on-demand experiences for virtual selling is a relatively new phenomenon. So, ask your accounts for feedback to ensure you’re on the right track and answering their questions. This will help improve future iterations of the on-demand virtual selling experience as well.

And that’s it, really. On-demand virtual selling is a great way to boost conversions and win rates. Keep in mind, though, that successful efforts require a lot of coordination between sales, marketing and web development teams.

Don’t forget to regularly promote your on-demand virtual selling opportunities once they’re created. And, if you’re creating an experience for a specific account, make sure visitors know that it’s on-demand and that a sales rep will respond. Good luck selling!