Improve Virtual Sales Close Rates Focusing 5 on Sales Skills
“How do we improve our virtual sales close rates?”… Is a common question I have been hearing from business owners and sales leaders?
They have spent the time and investments to bring in opportunities and their sales teams’ quote customers but they have low sales close rates. They want and need more sales opportunities and they want to improve their close rates so more revenue flows to the bottom-line.
If you couple low sales close rates and teams that do not have a continuous prospecting cadence your sales results will be a roller-coaster ride and very frustrating for business owners and sales leaders alike.
In my no smoke and mirrors process working with sales teams we reach out your customers and prospects to understand how they buy. Then we assess the sales team’s skills in 21 competencies then prescribe training and coaching to close any sales skills gaps we discover.
Improving sales closing skills is often #1 or in the top 3 of sales skills that consistently needs improvement.
Would it shock you to learn just over 50% of salespeople have never received sales skills training? (No wonder they struggle with selling based on value and closing!)
In this post we will share five sales skills to improve your virtual sales close rates.
Since April of 2020 I have helped a number of sales teams adapt and become stronger in virtual selling skills.
Five skills your sales team will want to improve for virtual sales include:
Building Rapport
Since moving to a virtual sales model and Zoom video meetings becoming the norm I have experienced salespeople skipping key steps like building rapport at the beginning of the call. Make sure and take the time to build rapport. Focus on people first products and solutions second. Every engagement is an opportunity to build your relationship with your customers.
Build Virtual Relationships
Approximately 60% of once outside salespeople are now struggling with virtual sales. They are finding it particularly difficult to build virtual relationships as easy as they once did face to face. I often speak at events and co-host training with best selling author Ed Wallace. Ed’s book: Business Relationships That Last provides five clear steps to strategically build relationships and they can be applied to building virtual relationships as well.
Discovery Questions
Create a list of great discovery questions you feel comfortable asking. Your goal is to ask great questions to discover if your customer or prospects has unresolved problems your product or service solves. Include industry terminology and make the questions open-ended so the customer shares their current challenges. Your team can have a list of questions they all need to ask but again make sure each person uses words and phrases they commonly use and ideally your buyer’s use.
Active Listening
To clearly understand the needs of your customers and prospects your sales team must develop active listening skills. From helping salespeople improve their sales effectiveness for over 35 years I have found most salespeople listen to reply not listen to learn. Building active listening skills is key in any consultative sale and is particularly important in virtual sales.
Qualifying questions
Once you have actively listened to your customer and clearly identified challenges your product or service solves we need to qualify.
An old school system I suggest teams use that still provides salespeople a great deal of value today called BANT.
B- do they have a budget or will you be helping them create a business case to win budget?
A – Authority, does the person, team, you are speaking with have the authority to make the purchase and if not who does?
N- Do you clearly understand the need and how they will measure success? What is the economic impact of not solving this need?
T– Timing, when do they need this problem solved, how long has this been a problems?
“By the nature of your question you can demonstrate industry experience, competence and build trust”
– Mark Roberts
If you need to significantly improve your close rate on profitable sales:
- Improve Rapport building
- Building Virtual relationships
- Create Strong Discovery Questions
- Active Listening Skills
- Equip your sales team with BANT Qualifying Questions
I plan to unpack each of the above five skills in the weeks to come so stay tuned.
I recently shared a short video to help teams adapt to virtual sales and you can access here. What many teams have discovered is once successful outside sales producers are now struggling to meet quota selling virtually. The good news is this is a sales problem we can solve with training, coaching and sales tools.
If your team needs to improve your virtual sales close rates, let’s schedule a call.
