Virtual Selling Insights from Stephanie

COVID-19 has had a major impact on the way that many companies sell their products. In 2020, it became necessary for most sales teams around the world to quickly adapt to virtual selling techniques in order not to be left behind. 

Amid the Omicron surge, it’s perhaps poignant that the global return to the office is now on hold. However, remote sales isn’t a temporary COVID-long substitute. It’s here to stay long-term. Even when Covid-19 becomes just a distant memory many industry experts believe that virtual sales will remain core to the strategy for sales professionals.

Customers’ expectations have changed. They want to buy online, even when it comes to big-ticket business purchases. Buyers would rather interact remotely when making purchasing decisions. It’s easier to schedule, and it’s cheaper than traveling. In addition, over two-thirds of sales pros report they aren’t heading back to the office full time any time soon.

During the Covid outbreak, Meetingbox completely reinvented itself. Instead of organising conferences, it started hosting virtual events and moulded into one of the leading providers of virtual 3D event environments. 

 Naturally, in this process, Meetingbox had to adopt virtual selling as part of its sales process. Standards, such as prospecting, building rapport, setting up and managing meetings started to exist in a new context: the digital world. The benefits are also evident – Meetingbox has decreased its conversion period by an average of 80%, they have doubled the number of qualified prospects they previously had by adopting virtual techniques, and have over 6x as many qualified meetings with potential customers. 

 We talked with Stephanie Beckers, Business Development Lead at Meetingbox, who gave us some great insights on how to translate traditional activities into this new context and develop virtual selling skills.

Stephanie, in the past, Succevo’s Meetingbox product business model was very much dependent on a physical events, however, due to the Covid Pandemics situation, this abruptly changed. What were the main challenges you faced when you had to adapt to the new reality of selling virtually and the new market as a Business Development Manager?

Honestly, even though as a Business Development Manager I was familiar with conducting business over virtual channels, we had to adapt to the new reality incredibly quickly. The main challenge probably was to translate all the traditional activities into remote selling features. Before Covid, we were doing lots of face-to-face meetings or physical networking which essentially created new leads to start the sales process. The Event Industry is heavily based on networks and relationships. However, after 2020 buying journeys accelerated and we had to take into account all the digital actions a buyer took, like the interactions with our website or social media channels. Additionally, we were entering a slightly new market, in a pandemic. This means that virtually meeting a larger number of prospects or buyers in a shorter period of time became more useful to us for sales purposes as well as product purposes. First impressions are always important – but now they are essential. 

Product-wise, we were still selling event technology, however for virtual events rather than physical events. In the early stages the quality of our product really helped and most importantly our understanding of events and what event customers need in every capacity was something we always had in our back pocket.‍

What remote selling technology did you use when you shifted from in-person selling to a remote selling environment?

Fundamentally, virtual selling is the process of integrating technology, especially video, into the sales process. To be honest I think there is a range of platforms you can use to do this really well – just make sure you have a great internet connection! With Meetingbox we had an opportunity to create jaw-dropping designs amazing virtual lobbies and demos to wow our clients – so not only could we let our customers check these out themselves, but they looked fantastic on a first-time video call. In order to stay connected in an operational setting we as a team took advantage of cloud collaboration, Google Docs, Dropbox, Office 365, and our own virtual events tool of course. We also stayed always connected via slack, and Microsoft teams.‍

Many of us are discovering the Zoom fatigue syndrome. How can sales reps have successful customer meetings when the bezels of a screen encapsulate our social interactions?‍

Yeah, we all know this feeling. However, there are ways to avoid it. First of all, never disregard the power of storytelling: you want your clients to be excited. You should highlight the value of your product and challenge them to ideas they didn't know even existed. This at Meetingbox was easily possible when hosting demos of our product. Our audience was amazed each time by the design we offered. If you think, people love pretty environments during physical events the same goes when using a virtual events platform, the only difference is digital environments can be more customisable and user-tailored.‍

What are the benefits of remote selling?

Virtual Selling is a very efficient way of selling. You can jump on a demo at any time, even if there is a time difference – it doesn’t matter because you are very easily available. Also, you can talk as much as you want because you can no longer annoy any of your colleagues :)‍

What are the disadvantages of selling remotely?‍

It's hard to network if you are working remotely, but there are ways around it. Join relevant LinkedIn groups or Slack channels and start posting more on both platforms! Connect with people in your industry through social media so they can introduce their friends as well - this will help create an engaging community of professionals who want nothing else than success for one another.