Will selling remotely become the norm post COVID -19 for B2B and Complex B2C field sales teams?
The early signs say ‘yes’, but let’s take a closer look at what’s happening.
Many things have been tossed up in the air with the advent of the COVID-19 crisis.
Take, for instance, the boom in Zoom meetings on every level – keeping people in touch with each other across the street, suburb, state and international boundaries. It’s something many of us are getting used to.
Whether it’s Zoom, MS Teams, Skype, Facetime, WhatsApp or even the humble telephone, staying in touch and communicating with people is vital to our existence as families, friends, teams, businesses, customers, sellers, suppliers, communities, economies, states and nations. Keeping people informed about what is happening in our world and finding out what’s happening in theirs helps us make sense of the current situation and find better ways to move forward.
In business, and especially B2B and complex B2C field sales, being able to stay in touch with our customers via remote communication technology has been a business life line during this time.
But is this just a temporary stop gap until the restrictions are over?
We think not. It seems that many businesses are realising that selling remotely for their traditional field B2B sales teams is working just fine and is also extremely cost effective. This has caused many businesses to review their COSA (cost of sales activity).
What is COSA?
COSA is the direct cost-to-company of a salesperson, plus the proportional cost of support functions for salespeople, divided equally across the sales team.
In the case of B2B and complex B2C field sales teams, the cost of cars, petrol, insurances, airline travel plus travel time have now come into question. The cost savings are immense and productivity would dramatically improve. Just think, no more waiting or travel time and what you can do with those reclaimed hours.
So will our field sales teams become totally remote selling teams? We don’t think so.
Hybrid Selling
B2B & Complex B2C field sales teams will likely develop a hybrid approach, meaning that they will sell remotely more often than before and in-field visits will become rarer. For instance, the weekly or monthly site or shop visit might become quarterly with other client meetings in between going remote. This is not a new phenomenon or trend, this has been on the rise for some time, but the physical isolation due to COVID-19 has accelerated this significantly. In a technology connected world we can do business and make sales pretty much with anyone from anywhere who has, at least, a smartphone. Even no-smart phones still work because we can still call over the phone.
Remote selling is here to stay and the impact will be immense. It will have far reaching effects on all sorts of business meetings, not just sales meetings. There is already much discussion about the collapse of business travel, especially air travel which will impact the travel, accommodation, car hire, fuel and other allied industries if this plays out in full.
Refocusing how and when we sell
Selling remotely will likely reduce the amount of ‘professional visiting’ that goes on in place of real selling. This will have huge cost implications in terms of business and sales productivity. We know that many client/sales meetings can often be social visits, not purposeful business meetings. Which is what you often get when you only measure quantity (“you have to see them once a month”) not quality. Remote selling will make salespeople much more focused and accountable and it will likely improve the quality and quantity of their sales efforts.
Remote customer calls via telephone or video will quickly become a waste of time for the customer if the salesperson can’t provide meaningful content to those conversations. The cup of coffee that would have bought you 20 minutes of the customer’s time can’t bring you that anymore.
This is why a topic inside our online Rapid Sales Recovery program is dedicated to selling remotely.
You might be asking so what’s so new about this? Telesales teams have been in place for years.
What’s new about this trend is that we are now taking complex B2B & B2C sales into the remote world and there are many factors that need to be included that are not part of the telesales world.
Author: Sue Barrett, www.salesessentials.com