Inside Sales Need Visual Support

In the B2B complex sale, more selling is occurring over the telephone than ever before. Whether part of a formal inside selling function, or as direct sales people working in the early stages of the customer engagement process, phone meetings and conference calls are the norm, not the exception.

Phone-based sellers can dramatically impact their customers and their sales effectiveness by delivering visual support to voice conversations with live web meeting technology.

For a decade we've heard from companies like Webex and Citrix that web meetings can give sales people a better way to conduct sales meetings without travelling to meet with customers.

Well, maybe, but I find myself frequently quoting from Lance Armstrong's autobiography, "It's Not About the Bike." It's not about the technology.

What's required to make effective use of web conferencing technology by inside sales?

1. Content. Specifically content that supports the conversations sales people have with customers. Without the right content, the technology is useless, or worse, it can become a negative experience for customers and frustrating for sales people.
2. Easy Access. Most visual content is created and stored as PowerPoint shows -- presentations. But a sales conversation is not a presentation. We need easy access to individual slides or groups of slides to address specific customer questions, to support a complex idea, or to deliver a proof point. We need to be able to do it quickly, almost without thinking. We don't have time to remember which deck has the slides we need, which directory they're stored in and to extract them so they can be presented.




3. Training and Support. We train people to have effective sales conversations over the telephone. Sales people need training and practice to comfortably use web conferencing during their sales calls. They need technical and technique call support in the early stages. A debriefing process should regularly identify missing but required content and quickly develop and update the repository.
4. Infrastructure Support. Unlike webinars and e-learning, many sales conversations are established in an ad hoc manner. Sales people and their customers need easy, instant access to web meetings, including minimal software downloads or plug-ins.

Visuals are engaging. They help not only message delivery, but message understanding. They help people "see" what we're talking about. Appropriate visual content, used correctly, make phone conversations efficient and effective.

But this shouldn't be left to sales people to figure out. A support program will pay rich dividends.