What are the Best Remote Sales Skills for Reps

Foreign hello and welcome to episode two of the Sell From Anywhere show. I'm Michelle Benford. I am the VP of Sales here at HubSpot and I'm currently calling from my bunker just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. I'm hiding from my children who are attempting a coup in response to their camp this summer. But for now I'm with you and thank you all for being with me. Last episode we focused on sales process and today we'll focus on the skills that sales reps should be fine tuning if they've made the transition to remote selling. We have a great episode lined up. We will have a short interview with Brian Williams. He is the CEO of Perspectivity International. Then we'll move on to a sales forecast segment and I will round out the episode by reviewing a resource that you can take back to your team and of course, show off. Now, this is an important and a timely episode because even though a lot of quotas probably haven't changed, the world has. Business needs have. Our prospects have. And sales reps today need to make sure that they can not just maintain their productivity, but also improve it. They still need to show empathy in the sales process and of course, close even more deals, especially if there was a business lull amidst Covid. So let's dive in. So today we are lucky enough to have Brian Williams, CEO and founder of Perspectivity Consulting. Brian, welcome.

Thank you. Awesome to be here.

Would love if you wouldn't mind giving us a brief introduction of yourself as well as Perspectivity.

I am a computer science grad. I went to Silicon Valley to become a dot com millionaire. I grew up poor, so I thought it's got to be cool having tons of money. So I went to Silicon Valley and every company I joined went absolute bankrupt. Right. So completely missed out on the millions, but learned a lot. Eventually would leave software and start on the marketing side and then sales and. And was taking these very complex technologies and simplifying them and then doing pitches in about 13 different countries and eventually would write a book on the process I learned. And that book basically is a foundation of the company I run today, Perspectivity, where we work with either tech companies or Fortune 500s on how to do just that, design and deliver advanced sales or business presentations.

I love that. That's great. And listen, I'm still working on making my millions. So speaking of kind of transitioning to these unique times that we've recently faced, and with your background, I'd love to ask just a couple of questions. How have you seen the skill set of a rep who's selling remotely today need to differ from reps who traditionally were selling in the field? What have they really needed to pivot with this new kind of inside sales remote sales skill set?

You know, I think a lot of things can remain the same, right? I think a lot of the fundamentals and even advanced sales skills need to remain the same. However, I have noticed a really big difference in selling remotely, right? And that is the ability to engage with the other person. I would make it mandatory to do all sales calls with Zoom, all of my calls. So I have this desk that rises and like lowers. You can probably see that a little bit. And I stand up and I do all of my calls and training calls standing. Because the energy transfers, you're moving around, your body language comes alive and all of that transfers across. Now, one challenge I've noticed is some people are having very difficult time selling virtually because if you can't see the other person, if it's a phone call or if you have it, like some people don't know Zoom really well, so they'll have it on speed speaker activated. So while they're talking, they're actually looking at themselves. And the person they're talking to is this little bitty box. And it's hard to engage with the other person in that. If you, because we're humans, aren't used to talking to themselves, right? So you'll notice over time, your body language drops, the engagement level drops. If you looking at yourself, I would also add, man, you got to make it interesting. I have. So I'm a, I'm a bootleg amateur magician, right? So I have these little tricks and things that I use. I have optical illusions. I thought I had one available there. I'm gonna show you one real quick.

Disappeared.

Told you I'm off the cuff. So, you know, as a sales guy, you got to have some money, right? So I use these big hundred dollar bills to make a certain point because you got to keep it interesting. This is something else that I use. I won't tell you why, but I have my own currency. There's a thousand dollar bill, right, With a pict it and all these things. This is my, one of my favorites. There's some IQ tests, optical illusions, and I'm. I'm asking questions just to kind of get them going and to let them know this is not going to be a typical Zoom call. Because nowadays when we get a meeting invite with a Zoom call, the reaction is one of these, right? So I Want to know off the cuff, this is going to be different. All those key differentiators are what let people know that this might be a different experience. Because ultimately, what I've learned is 80% of what most people are selling is about the same. Right. It's a lot of overlap. So you got to come up with something that's going to make the experience unique for them.

Yeah, yeah. One of the things our CEO Brian Halligan says a lot is it's not what you sell, it's how you sell.

Absolutely.

My big takeaway then from what you're sharing is, you know, how can you really cut through the noise? How can you be unique and really drive that engagement when you are connecting with someone through video versus what your tactic would have been, how you still been in the field? Is that correct?

Yeah. You know, I have to say, I always thought that you could not sell effectively virtually like you could in person. I have like a video out like a year ago or so saying that that is an absolute lie. You can totally kill it virtually. I think you can sell more and more effectively virtually than you can in person. Obviously, it depends on what you're selling, but I found that to be true in my own case, and I don't see why it wouldn't. Because the brain, like your picture, your image is in a. In a, you know, pretty good size on my screen. The brain doesn't know whether it's real or not. It sees the live human being right across from me talking. So you can get the same level engagement as you can in person as you can virtually. You just have to believe it because the brain believes it. I don't understand what would limit you from effectively being able to sell virtually because it's pretty much the same experience. Obviously, the only thing you can't do is give someone a product and let them hold it. But what we do inside of our business, part of our setup, we ship a package to every person that we engage with. Literally, we ship all over the world with FedEx. And we have a label. I mean, I want to give this away because it's really cool, but we have a label that tells them what to open during our training and our engagement with them. So we have labels. Open this first, don't open this till this date and that date. And so there's all this excitement around what's. What's in this box of what's in this thing. Right. And we open it and we use it. Tangible things that we do with the packages that we send. So we. There's no excuses, right? You got to make it happen, man. Covid has. We, of course, we were impacted by it, but we said, how can we be innovative and creative and still grow revenue? Like, we didn't change our sales goals for this year.

We're in the same boat. My sales numbers, in fact, I actually think they may have raised my sales numbers, to be honest. So I love what you're saying about, you know, you can be just as effective with the virtual meeting. But one of the areas where we found everyone has back is more time, right? People who used to commute to work, maybe they commuted to their sales appointments, they were in their car a lot more often. They were maybe entertaining in the evenings. People have gotten a lot more time back. So my question to you is, how can sales reps make the most out of their additional time in order to drive increase in productivity?

It's a great question and a great observation. In fact, we met with our CFO yesterday, and we're down 50% on travel expense for this year. We did do some travel first quarter of the year. We're down 50% now. What does that mean? That means there's been a massive increase in time available. I hope I never have to go to the airport. I'll be totally happy with that. Right. And here's why. What can you do? There's three things you can do more. More learning to develop your skill, right? Because you have the time to do it. You can do more prospecting, so you can do more selling, right? So if you're developing your skills, you're gonna sell better. If you're prospecting more, you're gonna sell, you're gonna have more opportunity. And if you have more opportunity and you've increased your skill set, you're gonna sell more. So to me, it's again, it's all about perspective. That's why I named the company Perspectivity. Right? It's all about perspective. I did not realize how much of a massive waste of time travel is. I have recovered so much time now. It's really exciting and how much I can get done in a day. So I say develop your skill set. Do more prospecting so you can have more opportunities to sell and actually sell more without question.

Yeah, I love that. You know, it's one of the things we've been. We've been coaching my team on quite a bunch, which is, you know, selling smarter, not harder. And, you know, how can we allow people to have some of that extra time back in their day and not using it to just work harder.

So it's all about perspective. Yes, a lot is happening. A pandemic is upon us. Civil unrest is upon us. Everything has changed. However, what perspective will you bring to the game and find opportunity where most people may not see one?

I love it. You know, I'll tell you, I will never look at perspective in the same way that I did prior to our chat. Brian, thank you so much for all your time today. It's obvious you have a lot of great best practices to share, not only with your own team, with a lot of the companies that you consult with as well. So thank you so much for being with us.

Absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here. Anything HubSpot or inbound, I'm all in.

Thank you and please stay tuned. Next up, we have a brief segment on our sales forecasts.

Hey there, I'm Cody Norman and welcome to the Sales Forecast where I'll review the most recent sales data from our Covid Benchmark tool. The data is aggregated from over 70,000 customers and you can follow along with me or go to the URL on the screen to pull up the data. Now, for the first time since March, the amount of deals created in HubSpot are above pre Covid benchmarks. There was a slight drop in closed deals compared to the previous week, but still above pre Covid benchmarks. The best news here is consistency. Since June 15, closed deals have trended above pre Covid benchmarks and deals created have hovered right around the line. It means that sales teams are having more success getting traction and carrying that traction into business. 1. Let's take a look at sales outreach with calls and emails. Sales teams continue to struggle to get responses to their email outreach. Email responses are down 24% with teams struggling to get responses to their emails. You might think that people would compensate with more sales calls, but calls are still 7% below that benchmark. It's hard to say what the right outreach strategy is. Right now. Every industry and business is in a different situation. Whether you're calling or emailing, make sure to take some time to understand the person or business you're interacting with so you can reach out with empathy. Thanks for listening to this week's sales forecast. Next up, we have Michelle again who will leave you with a hands on resource to take home with you today.

So today we covered some skills that are helpful for sales reps to master while selling remote. We talked about body language over video, how to use some of the commuting time you've gotten back, and more. We'll leave you with a resource called Data Driven Playbook for Sales Success. It's a guide that equips you with data, frameworks, processes and tips to help sales professionals level up their role. It includes productivity tips, insight into how quotas get made, and more. You can find the download link in the description. Thanks for joining us for episode two and tune in next week for episode three where we'll focus on tips for managing a remote sales team. Thanks. Yeah hey, what.