Change is hard. Unexpected change is harder.
In this time of disruption caused by what’s been declared a “pandemic,” it’s critical to proactively pursue business goals. Even as your priority is to ensure the safety of your employees, customers, and partners, business must continue throughout these difficult times.
We’re here to support you in creating a new “normal” that’s productive for your business in the interim.
You already use Modus. Your field sales reps and channel partners can use the tools and capabilities to continue to get sales done remotely.
How Sales Enablement Supports Remote Selling
Making the transition from face-to-face, in-person meetings to selling at a social distance will be different.
Consider the following six options to help your sellers make the shift:
Content is Even More Important
One of the biggest reasons you use sales enablement is to distribute content to your reps and ensure they’re using the latest, compliant version. As your customers’ needs and priorities shift due to the current situation, this means applying new thinking to content to help sellers help buyers. Update current content based on specific situational changes to stay relevant. Deploy new offers or promotions to service existing customers and help new customers find useful advantages during stressful times.
Modus was made for this. Use your What’s New area and push alerts to make sure your sellers are in lockstep as you adapt your go-to-market strategies. The ability to publish and distribute content in real-time will really pay off in our current situation.
Microlearning Helps Reps Position Buyer Conversations
As you push more content to your direct and indirect sellers, publish related Microlearning that shows them how to position that content with buyers. Armed with this knowledge, reps will reach out with empathetic communications that evoke curiosity and engagement, even in trying times.
As you gather information—or your reps do—about what’s changing with buyers, create videos to share what’s being seen and heard, what’s working and more importantly, what’s falling flat given the level of anxiety your buyers and customers are experiencing.
This may mean reframing the way you currently conduct outreach. Microlearning helps your reps quickly keep pace with what buyers need to hear to take a phone conversation or video meeting to learn more. They have objectives to achieve, just like you do.
Microlearning Helps Your Customers Excel
Most of you have customer portals to provide account and product information. Adding Microlearning to your portal helps simplify onboarding new customers and upskilling end users as new product features become available.
With on-site training in question in the near term, Microlearning can help you increase proficiency to ensure that your customers don’t miss a step in using your products to their highest value.
Conversational Tools Build Momentum
This new selling environment demands different approaches. If your reps haven’t used Modus to text with customers, connect via WhatsApp, or do trackable outreach over Twitter, now’s the time to use all the tools available. And, yes, those messages will also be tracked in your CRM.
Reps can continue to share content via sending links through Modus, using a variety of conversational channels to start and keep conversations going.
Your prospects are busier today than they were before the situation changed. They will appreciate to-the-point brevity and authentic, helpful communications they can ingest and respond to quickly at their convenience.
Virtual Product Tours on Video Calls Keep the “Touch” Factor in Play
As they say, seeing is believing. Publish Virtual Product Tours you build in Modus on web pages reps can use to drill down into aspects of your products where buyers show the most interest.
Just because they aren’t propping their tablet on the hood of a truck or sharing the Virtual Product Tour in a physician’s office doesn’t mean they can’t use it to have the same impact. Visual information is some of the most engaging content your reps can use in conversations with buyers. There’s no reason they should stop now, just because they’re not on site.
Create Virtual Product Tours for products reps demonstrated in person in the past. It’s fast and easy to do — and your reps may find that even when they go back into the field these new product tours are helpful.
Personalized Prospect Nurtures Drive Proactive Outreach
In addition to keeping existing deals moving forward, reps may no longer be able make in-person site visits as part of their outreach. Instead, they can use the follow-up function in Modus to create and send messages with links to content as outreach to engage new opportunities.
Think about a grouping of three links to related content to help build the story for how a buyer can use your products to solve a problem they’re facing, for example. This is the equivalent of being able to quickly create a content hub experience that invites buyers to binge on the information when they have a free moment.
Instead of the usual nurture programs you may send via marketing automation, this approach gives reps the opportunity to personalize the email for each prospect easily, improving the odds they’ll get a response.
The outreach will be tracked to the prospect’s contact record in your CRM. Alerts notify your reps when buyers view the content and which content they engage with enabling them to respond quickly and in context. Reps using the Agenda Builder to assemble their content for a prospect can easily track what they’ve shared with each prospect, adding to it as they continue developing new opportunities.
Customer Microsites
Your reps now have a conversational resource hub for digital buyer conversations.
Your buyers now view a microsite when your reps send links to content. On that landing page, the buyer will be able to easily access the content, share the content with colleagues, and interact with each other and the sales rep with a chat discussion thread right on the landing page.
When the content shared provokes more questions and inquiries, reps receive alerts and can easily respond to the discussion, add more content to the landing page to answer the buyer’s questions—and keep the conversation going.
This upgrade replaced the follow-up functionality your reps used to use. It functions the same way, but provides a much more engaging buyer experience designed to provoke inquiries and conversations.
We Challenge You to Challenge Us
I hope these ideas are valuable to helping you see potentially new ways to use Modus to help your field sales reps and channel partners continue to do business. One of our core principles is to always be in service to our customers. Our product roadmap is largely due to your suggestions and ideas.
If you have any additional ideas about what would be useful for you, please let us know. And we’re here to help you put the ideas above in play, so reach out if you need help or guidance.
All of us at Modus wish the best to all of you in dealing with this situation while continuing to run successful businesses.
