Sales has changed under working from home.

Working from home (WFH) seems to have led salespeople to assume that all that has changed is moving face-to-face meetings to online — nothing could be further from the truth. Whilst I am not going to make this blog a full treatise on sales process, I would like to highlight some of the challenges and opportunities under WFH.

At its heart selling is about engagement. Without engagement you will struggle to understand the underlying business problem and the differential manner in which you may be able to solve it. Before COVID-19 when you were targeting and meeting with prospects, consider the following general characteristics of your prospect.

People worked in their company’s offices. Their days were busy with internal meetings, travel to and from external meetings, coffee breaks and chats, travel to and from work, and interruptions from associates approaching them face to face. Of course there was the usual flow of emails requiring assessment and responses. As a salesperson, you needed to have poignant and perhaps different messages delivered possibly through multiple channels many times, to be able to cut through this “busyness” barrier in order to secure a meeting. Those multiple channels could be phone calling, emails, content marketing, regular mail, social media, events they attend, workplace associate contact on your behalf, and through communities of interest such as industry groups.

Assuming you managed to book a meeting, you would attend the prospects offices, with them having booked an appropriate room for your discussion and maybe presentation. That in itself is likely to have made their possible times and dates less likely to align with your availability. However, you got the meeting and attend their offices which gives you a “feel” for the prospects working environment, including their general interactions with other staff. The face-to-face meeting also allows you to “read” the prospects responses ie their body language as much as what they are saying. The prospect will also be “reading” you to gauge credibility, including how you dress (consciously or not).

Although the meeting is limited for time, if you engage very positively around your and the prospect’s area of interest, they may call others into the meeting at short notice to hear some of what you have to say. This is a good indication that you have hit the nail on the head. But most likely the prospect will mention others who may be interested, ask you to send further information, or book another meeting down the track.

Having gotten to this stage it is then up to you to continue the sales process through the usual steps to the point of a formal proposal. We won’t go into all that here but suffice to say that through the process you have qualified the prospect for budget, need, authority and timing. All this takes time. Now let’s look at the WFH situation.

Your prospect is now working from home most of the time with the first implication being that they are rarely in the office. That being the case, your phone calls to the office or to their direct landline may not be the best path for engagement. Neither are they likely to be attending any real-world events. Despite this, I know of salespeople persisting with traditional approaches and even wanting to still have face-to-face meetings instead of online.

Secondly, they are spending much less time “traveling” where I am defining traveling more broadly to be any time they are not at their desk/screen. This is very important as it gives you greater confidence that a (correct) message to that screen eg email, LinkedIn, content marketing, is much more likely to be read than before WFH. This has now greatly focused your channel for approach and should allow you to better refine what your message should be. With this greatly reduced travel time and no need to book meeting rooms, your prospect should also have many more time slots to accept an online meeting, if your message hits the spot. This also applies to other interested attendees for the meeting which then allows you greater penetration and influence in the target organisation.

Once your prospect has agreed to an online meeting, then how that plays out has now also changed. I have been very surprised by the casual nature of dress by almost all online attendees since COVID. It seems everyone understands and accepts that WFH means you can “dress down” in the comfort of your own home with no offence meant, or taken by others. This does not mean that you can attend in your pyjamas necessarily, but you get what I mean. However, it again focuses you back to your messaging. In face-to-face meetings you can use your appearance and body language to assist in your prospect engagement but now it is all about your messaging. Don’t forget though that a smile goes a long way.

When presenting online, there are some challenges, not the least of which is knowing how your message is being received. Attendees may have their sound and camera switched off “to save on bandwidth” which gives you no feedback at all! That being the case you need to make online presentations even more interactive than face-to-face. You will need to draw attendees into the conversation regularly, without merely repeating “any questions” every 30 seconds. However, in prep for your online meeting you should have opened all and any windows on your device in order to be able to quickly respond or proactively change what you are showing to validate your value proposition.

So let’s summarise where we are at with sales process and WFH.

• Your channel to prospects via their screen time is more predictable for direct or general online contact if you have the right message.
• Your prospects should be more open to online meetings than they were to face-to-face meetings. My anecdotal evidence is showing this to be true even for senior executive engagement.
• The prospects increased availability for online meetings also allows you to expand your influence by proactively requesting inclusion of others who may have an interest in your proposition.
• Your online presentations need to change to being highly interactive sessions if you wish to properly understand the business challenges and whether your prospect agrees with your value proposition.

Overall, the increased agility of WFH should expedite your sales process if the fit is right for your prospect. By the way, the “coffee catch-up” has now become “how are you coping under COVID”!