How to increase conversion rates with a culture of instant online demos

How do you reach sales leads who aren’t online? How do you contact those hard-to-reach customers? Depending on your sector, products or services, this could be a challenge your sales team is struggling with every day.

At the same time, in low-budget and fast-paced B2B transactional, once you’ve got prospects on the phone the aim should be to convert on that call. No waiting. Forget booking future appointments. Once a decision maker is on the phone, encourage them to make a decision.

For many sales teams, therein exists one of the biggest challenges they face. Managers and team members are struggling with this day in day out, especially when potential customers aren’t that easy to reach.

How to reach difficult prospects?

In certain sectors, prospects are easy to reach. Sales teams can engage and interact with them a number of ways, across multiple channels, and because they’ve got an online presence you can be sure that you have the ability to stay on their radar with marketing and advertising efforts.

However, not every sector and not every prospect fits the always online hyper-connected model and profile. In the digital sector, there are millions of small business clients and prospects who aren’t online yet; who thanks to our hyper-connected world and customer expectations, need a digital presence.

For agencies in the digital sector, all of these are potentially viable and valuable long-term prospects. In the next article, we will cover creative ways sales teams can reach these prospects. In this article, we will look at how sales teams can aim to convert them on one call, instead of two, three or more, using instant online demos.

What’s needed for quick decisions from prospects?

Firstly, you need to be offering a service/product that can produce a decision within the space of a single phone call or online demo.

Secondly, as is the case with every sale, you need to be offering the right product/service to the right prospects at the right time.

A level of awareness is always helpful too. Prospects are naturally going to be skeptical if they get a call and haven’t heard of your company. Or even if they have; prospects that have no awareness of the problem, never mind the solution, aren’t as likely to go ahead as those who are aware they need a solution to this particular problem.

Companies that implement awareness, marketing, educational, or advertising campaigns are usually in a stronger position when it comes to outbound sales.

Assuming these factors are in place, once a salesperson is actively speaking with a decision maker, now is the opportunity to close a sale in one call.

How to close a sale in one call?

Every sale is different, of course. However, with the same factors and structures in place for every call and demo, a sales team can increase the chances of success and dramatically reduce the sales cycle.

When sales teams cut down the number of calls/demos it takes to get a client to say yes, they can sell more and faster. When a sales team does this, revenue goes up. Targets are easier to hit. Sales managers, and team members, can breath a little easier knowing they’re hitting goals more easily and earlier in the month.

To achieve these objectives, the following needs to be put in place by sales managers to help teams hit targets:

• A clear value proposition. Can your product/service be easily and quickly explained on every call? If not, this needs to reviewed, changed and tested until sales teams have something that will help them close more deals at an accelerated rate.
• A simple process and ROI for clients. Potential clients want to know what you can do for them, how it will make their life easier/better, and what they can expect from making the investment required to get results.
• Qualifying questions. Are you sure every prospect is a good potential client? Budget is a question that needs to be asked, but beyond that, there are always going to be questions that need to be asked to ensure a prospect is the right fit. Make sure to have answered these already through previous information gathering activities, and if not, then clarify and ask the relevant questions on the call.
• Have the right software in-place to make every instant online demo quick and seamless. How do you sell a product quickly: talking or showing? If you show someone something, they can understand and see for themselves, and therefore make a decision more effectively. One of the advantages of online demos. For every call, give your prospects the option of “a quick online demo.” With CrankWheel, as one of our glowing reviews points out, a prospect can “join a screenshare with no complicated installs, meeting codes, or other hassles.”
• Make instant online demos a default sales activity. Finally, to achieve a shorter sales cycle and therefore ensure sales team members can sell more, make screensharing part of the sales team culture. Embed it into the processes and KPIs. Doing a sales call? Think demo or presentation on that same call. If a prospect doesn’t want an online demo, fair enough. Go with what is best for a prospect, but make sure this is offered on every call, thereby increasing the chances of converting more prospects on a single call instead of two or more.

CrankWheel: Cut your sales cycle in half with instant screen-sharing. Go from two or more sales calls to one: Become a one call close sales team.