How to Redesign a Sales Organization for Virtual

For those of us that sell physical products to hospitals, the job may never be the same.  Medical Sales VP’s are asking:

• How do I replace all those face-to-face interactions?

• If my remote salespeople can’t go into a hospital, how do I adjust my mix of inside and outside sales resources?

Are these the right questions? There are always new opportunities in a time of change, and we need to explore what virtual selling can offer:

• Showing up in person is no longer required to communicate that a customer is important.

• Travel time and money are saved.

• It’s easier to pull technical experts into a virtual meeting than to bring them onsite.

• In a well-designed virtual demo, it can be easier to pivot to another product offering if the initial one misses.

• More customer stakeholders can participate in virtual meetings, either live or asynchronously.

• Meetings are recorded for later reference.

• There is potential for vendors to be more responsive.

• We can apply best practices to key moments in the sales cycle that would previously have been F2F interactions.

The Customer Buying Process

How might we look beyond a “sales cycle” to the complete customer buying process, addressing pain points before, during, and after our sales work happens? How might we make the whole process faster and less resource-intensive for the customer? If we get better input and buy in from stakeholders, this can create better outcomes for the hospital, lower the risk of a bad buying decision or implementation, and create stickiness and positive references for the vendor.

Map the full customer buying process and design pivotal moments with intention:

• The customer assembles their short list and you're on it.

• The customer discovers a great feature or benefit on their own.

• It becomes clear that you really heard and understood the need.

• A key user buys into the solution.

• The customer becomes confident that your team can and will execute.

Companies should capture the ways their best salespeople orchestrate these moments and improve on them further in a virtual context. Each step is a brainstorming session - how might we make it not just equivalent but better for the customer?

Organization

What if we raised the bar on responsiveness? If salespeople aren’t tied up traveling or in onsite meetings, we should be able to respond to a customer faster. Perhaps a virtual team spread across time zones can be available over a longer customer day. Customers should get A+ service when they want it.

Sales management has a set of assumptions about the roles of inside and outside sales resources, but we are all remote now. I miss the human connection, but remote work does have benefits. A company can accommodate an employee's preference to live in a less expensive town rather than a major metropolitan area, improving their quality of life and potentially reducing cost. A company can hire based on skill set and character, rather than compromising to hire in the right locale.

If the product is a physical one, perhaps the only inside sales resources needed are technical experts who spend their time in the company’s usability lab doing live video demos. Or consider creating interactive virtual experiences in a gaming environment. These technologies are accessible and surprisingly cost effective.

Another approach is to assemble an ad-hoc deal team consisting of a relationship manager, a technical product expert, a project manager, perhaps an expert in a particular stage of the customer's implementation. The team can be geographically dispersed. Senior management can participate in more customer meetings. This was already common for larger complex sales, but now a similar level of expertise and attention can be applied to smaller deals.  

Communication

In February, I was relatively new to Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom.  Not anymore!  Of course customers have gone through this same learning process.  Why not create a deal-specific channel that directly includes customer stakeholders, improving availability and the transparency of the whole process?  Accommodate chats and brief interactions, while capturing it all in context for the entire customer-vendor team to see.

In working with a hospital here in the SF Bay Area last year, I saw firsthand the difficulty of bringing all the stakeholders together on a construction project.  As we iterated through changes, it was impossible to involve everyone in the on-site design reviews and still stay on schedule.  The inevitable result was that when everything was done, I had failed to capture some important input, and a couple people were dissatisfied.  If those design reviews had instead been virtual, short, and recorded, stakeholders could have participated, live or asynchronously, offered input, and remained up to date. 

Cristiansen Group LLC is a consultancy helping small-to-medium sized businesses redesign their sales strategy and organization to meet current challenges.  Schedule a time at www.csengroup.com to discuss your business or email us directly at cris@csengroup.com