Virtual Selling

A Quick-Start Guide to Leveraging Video, Technology, and Virtual Communication Channels to Engage Remote Buyers and Close Deals Fast

Jeb Blount

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119742791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

And just like that, everything changed...

A global pandemic. Panic. Social distancing. Working from home.

In a heartbeat, we went from happy hours to virtual happy hours. From conferences to virtual conferences. From selling to virtual selling.

To remain competitive, sales and business professionals were required to shift the way they engaged prospects and customers.

Overnight, virtual selling became the new normal. Now, it is here to stay.

Virtual selling can be challenging. It's more difficult to make human to human connections. It's natural to feel intimidated by technology and digital tools. Few of us haven't felt the wave of insecurity the instant a video camera is pointed in our direction.

Yet, virtual selling is powerful because it allows you to engage more prospects and customers, in less time, at a lower cost, while reducing the sales cycle.

Virtual Selling is the definitive guide to leveraging video-based technology and virtual communication channels to engage prospects, advance pipeline opportunities, and seal the deal. You'll learn a complete system for blending video, phone, text, live chat, social media, and direct messaging into your sales process to increase productivity and reduce sales cycles.

Jeb Blount, one of the most celebrated sales trainers of our generation, teaches you:

• How to leverage human psychology to gain more influence on video calls
• The seven technical elements of impactful video sales calls
• The five human elements of highly effective video sales calls
• How to overcome your fear of the camera and always be video ready
• How to deliver engaging and impactful virtual demos and presentations
• Powerful video messaging strategies for engaging hard to reach stakeholders
• The Four-Step Video Prospecting Framework
• The Five-Step Telephone Prospecting Framework
• The LDA Method for handling telephone prospecting objections
• Advanced email prospecting strategies and frameworks
• How to leverage text messaging for prospecting and down pipeline communication
• The law of familiarity and how it takes the friction out of virtual selling
• The 5C's of Social Selling
• Why it is imperative to become proficient with reactive and proactive chat
• Strategies for direct messaging – the "Swiss Army Knife" of virtual selling
• How to leverage a blended virtual/physical selling approach to close deals faster

As you dive into these powerful insights, and with each new chapter, you'll gain greater and greater confidence in your ability to effectively engage prospects and customers through virtual communication channels. And, with this newfound confidence, your success and income will soar.

Following in the footsteps of his blockbuster bestsellers People Buy You, Fanatical Prospecting, Sales EQ, Objections, and Inked, Jeb Blount's Virtual Selling puts the same strategies employed by his clients—a who's who of the world's most prestigious organizations—right into your hands.

PART I
Foundation

1
And, Just Like That, Everything Changed

A global pandemic. Panic. Social distancing. Working from home. An economic crisis.

In a heartbeat, we went from happy hours to virtual happy hours. From conferences to virtual conferences. From the classroom to the virtual classroom. From selling to virtual selling.

To be sure, we've sought out and used virtual communication channels since the dawn of man. It began with smoke signals and then written letters. We've even used carrier pigeons.

Innovation in virtual communication accelerated in the nineteenth century with the telegraph—which was essentially very slow text messaging. The telegraph was soon disintermediated by the telephone.

In the 1980s, we fell in love with the fax machine, which was, likewise, disintermediated by email in the 1990s. In the ensuing decades, the online chat rooms of the 1990s morphed into texting, direct messaging, interacting on social media, and then interactive chat.

As early as 1880, an inventor named George Carey proposed a video phone. His idea was published in Scientific American. Forty-seven years later, in 1927, Herbert Hoover stepped into a video booth at Bell Labs and made a video call.

By the 1960s, AT&T had developed video technology to the point that it went to market with the Picturephone, but it was a flop. For the next 30 or so years, video calling failed to launch.¹ Then, in 2003, Skype kicked off the modern age of video calling.

In 2007, the iPhone changed everything. This was quickly followed by FaceTime in 2010, Zoom in 2013, and then Facebook Messenger video calls in 2015. Finally, the convergence of broadband internet and inexpensive hardware made the video call accessible to all.

Today video calling, though underutilized by sales professionals, is the most powerful and effective virtual communication channel of them all.

Technology Meets the Moment

The global coronavirus pandemic of 2020 accelerated the adoption of virtual selling much like the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 accelerated the emergence of inside sales teams and the division of sales labor into business development, selling, account management, and customer success (land, expand, and retain).

Except that this was faster, compressing what might have taken 10 years to fully actualize into a matter of months. In an instant, to remain relevant and competitive, salespeople, account managers, entrepreneurs, and business professionals had to shift the way they were engaging prospects and customers. Likewise, prospects and customers had to shift the way they interacted with vendors.

The evolution of virtual selling technology finally met its moment. Digital transformation, which for the past 20 years had been an inevitable yet slowly building tide, rolled over us like a tsunami. Suddenly, virtual selling became king.

Unlike so many other pivotal points in history, in which smart people were forced, out of necessity, to invent technology in order to meet the moment, this time the technology was ahead of us. We simply needed to catch up.

This is where we find ourselves. Virtual selling is the new normal. There is no turning back.

The Purpose of This Book

My objective is to teach you techniques that turn virtual communication platforms into powerful and effective sales tools, no matter what you sell, the complexity or length of your sales cycle, or whether you are an inside rep, field rep, or hybrid of the two. Virtual Selling is the most comprehensive and practical resource on video-based and digital sales skills ever developed.

This book will help you:

• Become more effective with virtual communication tools so that you can connect, engage, and build deep and lasting relationships with other people.
• Leverage technology, digital tools, and virtual communication channels to increase the number of connections you make and accelerate the speed at which you make those connections.
• Blend virtual selling channels and tactics into your sales process to increase productivity.
• Master virtual techniques to allow you to separate from competitors and gain a distinct competitive edge.
• Make virtual selling more human.

As you dive into these powerful insights, and with each new chapter, you'll gain greater and greater confidence in your ability to leverage virtual communication channels and conduct successful virtual sales calls. And, with this newfound confidence, your success and income will soar.

Note

1. 1. Stewart Wolpin, “The Videophone Turns 50: The Historic Failure That Everybody Wanted,” Mashable, April 20, 2014, https://mashable.com/2014/04/20/videophone-turns-50/.

2
Is Face-to-Face Selling Dead?

I want to be clear from the start that I'm not an evangelist. I'm not an ideologue.

I despise and have no respect for the so-called “experts” and “gurus” who get on their high horse and shove their evangelism for a preferred technology platform or sales method down your throat. These are the same people who pontificate that their way is the ONLY way. They shout loudly that everything else in sales and business is dead.

These sad charlatans couldn't sell their way out of a paper bag. Somewhere, there is a graveyard full of the carcasses of former blowhard sales gurus who made a lot of noise, produced unimpressive results, and then died a quick death because their message was so shallow and self-serving (see social selling evangelists). Thankfully, real, frontline sales professions easily see through this bullshit.

This book is titled Virtual Selling. But this does not mean I am against face-to-face selling or, for that matter, against any particular type of selling. There are many products and services perfectly suited to field sales and physical face-to-face selling. Likewise, there are many products and services perfectly suited to inside sales and pure virtual selling. In the same vein, there are plenty of products and services that can be sold without the need of a salesperson.

Over the past decade, many companies have replaced field sales teams with inside sales, only to add field sales back when they realized that not having a face-to-face sales presence was costing them market share. Likewise, companies with pure inside sales teams have added a field sales presence to allow them to be more competitive and responsive to buyers.

Thousands of companies these days operate and sell through blended teams of inside and outside sales professionals, along with phone, email, chat, text and ecommerce. These forward-thinking organizations understand that there are different types of buying journeys, differing complexities, different risk profiles and different sales cycles.

The key is applying the right sales channel and approach to meet buyers where they are and how they prefer to buy. This will give you the highest probability of inking a deal at the lowest cost. Win probability—and your ability to bend win probability in your favor—is all that matters.

Probability versus Ideology

In sales, context matters. There are few black-and-whites, few right ways or wrong ways. In sales, no matter how hard the so-called experts might want it to be so, there is no one-size-fits-all. There is no “one way.”

What works in a transactional sale will not work in an enterprise-level sale. Selling to the government is dif...