13 tips to Improve your Remote Selling Conversion Rates
In the past couple of years, the status quo has definitely been challenged and, at times, reshaped by the pandemic. It has changed so many aspects of daily life, from education to work to even how people select and consume products. It’s safe to say that there isn’t a single sector that hasn’t experienced some sort of shift as a result of the coronavirus.
When lockdowns became the new normal, many businesses needed to adapt in order to survive. Many of those have since been able to reopen in a more traditional sense, but the advent of shopping online doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.
The increasing demand for online retail has caused many companies to rethink the way they target and service their customers. Some retailers in America reported up to a 140% increase in digital sales in the first quarter of 2020 alone, and these numbers don’t seem to be decreasing.
The needs and demands of the modern customer are changing, and to survive, it’s important that businesses understand these changes and how to capitalize on them in order to widen their sales funnel and increase conversion rates.
Remote selling is at the forefront of these innovations, but how can salespeople improve their remote selling conversion rates? Read on to find out more.
Shortcuts:
- How to Increase Remote Selling Conversion Rates
- Engage More Customers Online
- Leverage Video Chat to Communicate With Customers
- Focus on Building Customer Rapport
- Always Be Attentive to Customers
- Set Clear Selling Goals
- Always Allow the Customer to Ask Questions
- Ensure You Regularly Follow Up With Customers
- Leverage Effective Online Tools
- Use Social Media Channels to Engage Users
- Track All Interactions
- Score Your Leads
- Integrate With a CRM System
- Always Deliver Clear Calls to Action For Customers
What is Remote Selling?
The basic principle of remote selling is that both the sales agent and the customer are in two separate geographical locations. In the early days of this practice, it was often referred to as virtual selling. In remote sales, conversations that lead up to a purchase take place either over the phone, via email or, more recently, via video chat.
Remote selling was very commonly used as a method in B2B sales in the past, but it has now started to become a very common form of selling for B2C transactions across a very broad section of industries, including the food industry, retail and travel.
As people have become more accustomed to technology, they are seeing fewer and fewer reasons to visit ‘brick and mortar’ businesses to find the goods or services they require and, in general, this is where remote selling boosts profits.
How to Increase Remote Selling Conversion Rates
As the innovations of technology have encouraged customers to become more comfortable with buying things remotely, it’s important to know how the remote selling space is different and what tips can be used to help increase remote selling conversion rates.
Engage More Customers Online
In order to convert online customers, it’s important to find them in the first place, and one great technique to do that is to develop strong customer engagement. This is about encouraging potential customers to reach out to sales agents in an online space. This should be done in an easy-to-facilitate manner that explicitly makes the customer feel like there’s no commitment. There are a few ways this can be done.
Providing a live chat option via your website or through social media can be a good way to help establish a connection with customers. A pop-up box can be programmed to ask customers if there is anything specific they are looking for or if they would like to speak with someone.
Chatbots can also be a great method of customer engagement. They can capture a potential customer’s attention quickly by starting a conversation or taking vital pieces of information that can greatly assist in the sales process.
Leverage Video Chat to Communicate With Customers
Remote sales will always be better supported with the ability to use video chat. Experience has shown that it doesn’t matter which industry or if a company is B2B or B2C; live video chat is one of the best ways to engage with potential customers when remote selling.
One of the main reasons this is such an effective tool is that it takes a salesperson and transforms them from an entity who sells a product into a three-dimensional person. The bottom line when it comes to selling is that people tend to trust people over disembodied voices or emails. In fact, studies have shown that when sales companies engage in video chat with potential customers, they tend to convert sales at 4 times the rate they would without it.
Focus on Building Customer Rapport
It doesn’t matter what method of communication is being used; it’s always essential to build good relationships with potential customers in order to increase sales. Having a good rapport with customers is essential for good conversion rates. This is because building a rapport with a customer develops and maintains a certain level of trust, especially in a world where the general feelings about salespeople are changing.
A recent study found that less than 50% of millennials and Gen Z consumers feel that they can actually trust businesses. This is concerning considering that millennials are the largest working generation on the planet.
Developing a good rapport is a great way to create trust, and this is a key factor in sales conversion when using a remote selling method.
Always Be Attentive to Customers
In a world where emails can come at any moment, and there always seem to be a million things to do, it can be hard to give full attention to even the most demanding of tasks, but it’s essential for success in remote selling. A salesperson should always at least appear to be giving potential customers their full, undivided attention.
Before making a remote sales call, take the time to eliminate all potential distractions. If it means putting your inbox or online status to ‘busy,’ then do so. It can also be worth making sure the space a salesperson is working from is free from visual distractions.
If a salesperson is using video chat, perhaps enable the blurred background function to limit distractions. It’s also worth taking the time to set up a camera workspace so that it at least always appears that you are making direct eye contact with the customer.
One extra piece of advice is to note down personal details that are offered. For example, if a client mentions they just had a baby or are about to go on vacation. This can be brought up again in a later call. It shows that the salesperson is listening and therefore develops more trust.
Set Clear Selling Goals
Goals are an integral part of any business or career plan. They help professionals to establish targets and forge a path toward the future. It’s also important that when setting goals, they are and remain very clear and realistic.
It’s important to know exactly what it will look like when a goal is reached and also if the goal is realistically achievable in the first place.
With remote selling, often a call or meeting is established in advance, so it can also be a good idea to set individual sales goals for each call. Take the time to understand what the client wants from their initial enquiry and set a goal to provide that to them in a simple and accommodating way.
Always Allow the Customer to Ask Questions
No sales conversation should ever be one-sided; they should be two-way conversations. Yes, a salesperson needs to be able to take the time to make their pitch, but the customer should feel, at all times, like they can ask questions.
Never assume that a customer knows they are allowed to interrupt with questions. The salesperson should take the time to let them know that if they are unsure about anything or need something expanded on, they can ask at any point, and it will be done without judgement. Real-time question answering will always work much better than leaving questions till the end of a pitch because it can sometimes be difficult to explain things out of context.
Giving customers the chance to ask questions in real-time helps establish trust in both the salesperson and the product or products they are selling.
Ensure You Regularly Follow Up With Customers
In an ideal world, one conversation would be all it takes to secure a sale and sometimes this happens, but not every single conversion happens with just one interaction. It’s understandable that some customers need time and space to make a decision before committing to something. This is often the case with B2B selling or when dealing with luxury sales.
If this is the case, it’s important to follow up with the customer. It can be great to follow up an initial conversation with the details from it in an easy-to-understand format. In some cases, it can even be possible to record the conversation and send an audio or digital file to them afterwards so they can pull out any necessary information at their leisure.
Always check that both the customer and the salesperson have the correct details to get in touch with each other, and it can also be a good idea to establish a set time when to follow up. Even asking which days or times are good to chat can open up lines of communication better than just calling out of the blue a week later.
Taking the time to do this can establish a better rapport and allow the customer to see that the salesperson is just someone who can help solve a problem or provide peace of mind and isn’t simply trying to close a sale at any cost.
Leverage Effective Online Tools
Thanks to the advent of digital technology, there is a myriad of online tools to assist in almost every step of the sales process, and they can be used to give salespeople a very competitive edge in the market.
There are tools to help with everything from customer information to communication, to follow-up and emailing, and even to assist in demonstrating how products work (but more on that later).
Investigating and using online tools to streamline the sales process will give salespeople more time to do what they do best; find effective solutions for customer needs.
Use Social Media Channels to Engage Users
Although the particular platform may differ from person to person, a large majority of the world uses social media as their primary form of communication. In fact, roughly 4.26 billion people are on some form of social media and use it daily. This is more than half the population of the world, and as a side effect of the endemic use of social media, using it as a means to purchase or sell things has become very common.
Having a social media presence is essential for any business in the modern world. It provides a place for potential customers to get to know a business’s products, values and success stories. It also gives customers an additional place to make first contact or follow up.
Track All Interactions
The ability to track and analyse performance is vital to success in remote sales. It can help salespeople to see how much time they are spending on individual tasks and what kind of rewards they are getting out of them.
It can be incredibly insightful to learn that perhaps the clients that take up the most amount of time aren’t really the bread and butter of a business, or perhaps it might be the complete opposite.
Tracking all aspects of the sales journey will provide invaluable information that can, in turn, be used to streamline the sales process and reap bigger commissions.
Score Your Leads
In sales, it’s true that every lead has potential, but over time, not all leads deserve the same amount of attention and effort to convert them. To achieve long-term success as a remote sales agent, it’s necessary to look at each sale almost like a small business. How much time and energy went into converting the sale? Were there other sales that would have converted much quicker if this sale didn’t take so long? Which clients ended up never converting, and how much energy was spent trying to convert them?
These are all questions that can be answered by scoring leads as part of the natural tracking cycle. It’s a simple matter of taking the time to understand which clients yield the most out of time and energy.
Integrate With a CRM System
The term CRM stands for Customer Relationship Manager. CRM systems are brilliant tools for running a sales-related business. A good CRM is able to manage all aspects of client interaction.
CRMs can capture information about how clients find a business, their general information, particular interests, products they have purchased in the past and products they might be likely to purchase in the future. A good CRM can help take the guesswork out of selling and arm a good salesperson with the tools they need to convert.
It’s a lifesaver to be able to plug in the information of a particular client and find every piece of information related to their sales journey at a glance. Good salespeople have a knack for details, and an effective CRM can make them unstoppable.
Always Deliver Clear Calls to Action For Customers
A ‘Call to Action’ (CTA) is a sales industry term that encompasses any communication that encourages potential customers to do something. It could be encouraging them to find out more, booking an appointment with a sales agent or even something as simple as visiting a website.
All salespeople ultimately want the perfect CTA to be related directly to making a sale, but there are many CTAs that can be utilised to benefit the sales process. For example, if a salesperson or company has informative literature that can help customers to decide on a particular product or service, an effective CTA could be to encourage them to subscribe to a mailing list that will deliver similar information to them.
One factor that can skyrocket a sales funnel is to establish effective CTAs that better reinforce a particular salesperson or brand as a source of reliable information without being pushy. On websites and social media, all roads should lead to a call to action that makes sense and helps illustrate that a salesperson is here to help solve any problems related to their expertise.
How Can CrankWheel Enhance Your Remote Selling Conversion Rates?
In the world of remote selling, it’s important to do whatever it takes to get a competitive edge over the competition. Most people have infinite levels of information to digest on a daily basis, and it’s integral to set yourself apart from others in the drive to secure sales and convert leads.
Crankwheel has created some innovative solutions to help set you apart from your contemporaries. It’s now easier than ever to conduct a sales call via the internet, which opens avenues for what is possible in your sales pitch. Crankwheel has taken the concept of screen sharing and made it an easy-to-use tool that can blend seamlessly into your current workflow.
Now you can demonstrate and present to potential customers without needing them to download and install software. Sharing information can be as easy as sending a link via SMS or email to a client anywhere on the planet.
The innovation that Crankwheel has developed makes it much easier to visually present, share data and evidence and even demonstrate in real time how particular products can help clients, which can be essential tools for closing a deal in a market where the competitive edge is everything.
How Can You Trial CrankWheel Today?
The screen sharing capabilities offered through Crankwheel can really help to further illustrate points and set salespeople apart from others in the market, and you can check out all that they have to offer with a no-risk, free trial today.
Conclusion
The world has become way more connected than ever before, and a benefit of this means that it’s become easier to succeed in remote sales, provided you have the tools and resources that can give you a competitive advantage.
The entire world has changed in the past few years, and so has the nature of selling. It’s both fascinating and exciting, so get out there and discover how to make remote selling work for you.