The B2B buyer is now willing to spend way more remotely, which is good news for sellers with large deal sizes or a high annual contract value. Still, sales organizations may need to up their digital-sales game to close these larger deals, which can pose quite the challenge.
In McKinsey’s recent B2B Pulse, one thing was made clear: The B2B buyer is getting more and more comfortable in digital channels, and is willing to spend more in these channels. In fact, the study showed that a whopping 35 % of B2B buyers are “willing to spend $500,000 or more” remotely – a figure that was 27 % a year ago. This, while close-to 80 % of buyers are up for spending $50 000 or more.
With such a change in B2B-buyer behavior, there is huge potential for sales organizations with an average deal size -or annual contract value – that sits on the higher end of the spectrum. That said, they may need to adjust their approach to stay competitive and close these larger deals in our new remote reality – given that customers are now expecting vendors to have higher digital capacities and that customer relations now need to be nurtured in a digital setting.
If you’re a sales leader in one of these sales organizations, you may be wondering how you can actually go about winning these larger deals remotely. Where we think that two factors will play a big part:
1. Build the relationship over time
With larger average deal sizes come longer deal cycles, where the relational aspect of sales becomes absolutely critical. I.e odds are these deals do not come about as a simple transaction, but as as a result of a relation – prompting a need to build customer relations over time. To do this, you can gain a lot from finding a sales enablement tool that can bridge the gap that exists between you and your customer, when you’re interacting from a distance. Where our own SP_CE Digital Sales Room can be a great bridge and act as a single point of interaction throughout the whole process.
What that means is that you can meet your customer in a single space throughout your journey. There, you can handle all interactions that occur throughout the process, including the meetings and everything that happens between them (such as presentations, offers, video -and chat messages). It will make it easier to collaborate and give the customer a personalized experience, both of which are important factors when it comes to building a relation over time.
2. Give sales and marketing a chance to work together
McKinsey explains how a bunch of factors, including “the need to personalize content”, have created a huge need for marketing and sales to collaborate. This is not an entirely new realization, but worth noting as MicKinsey also showed how “57 percent of respondents report that their sales teams still do not fully utilize (and often ignore) content created by marketing”. The challenge, then, is to give your sales and marketing teams a chance to work together – and encourage sales teams to actually use the material marketing creates.
This happens to be an area where our SP_CE Digital Sales Room shines, as it lets you create and design Templates and allow different people, from different departments, to work together. What this means is that sales and marketing can collaborate and build outstanding templates for how your Digital Sales Rooms should look, with the right material, presentation and branding. Templates that sales teams can then easily use when meeting customers and prospects, ensuring that the right content is shown for the right customer, or customer type. As a an added bonus, it will also give you a chance to create a consistent, branded, experience for your customers – something that was a must-have for 80 % of the buyers in McKinsey’s study.
Do you want to learn more about building customer relations over time, or see how SP_CE can let marketing and sales work together to close larger deals? Check out our Remote Sales Hub or contact us for a demo to talk to one of our Remote Sales Experts.
