Async Selling Re-Start

As someone long used to selling across different time zones, the ‘remote’ work evangelists are catching my ear quite a bit at the moment.

They feel that the genie is out the bottle. Whether espousing the death of the office, or simply a hybrid split embedding between home and cubicle, they are incredulous that those they see as dinosaurs mandate back-to-the-office diktats.

Their arguments are not merely societal, such as those of commute-free days, interruption-less blocks for deep working time, and general wellbeing. Nor are they purely financial, referring to the oodles of cash freed up from shrinking smaller office footprints, reduced travel budgets and potentially larger managerial spans of control. The established proponents now point more to what they see as greater productivity, from larger best available talent pools, with higher quality of output.

Perhaps the biggest shift in emphasis they tout, is that to asynchronous work.

Removing the insistence that everybody must be present at the same time for everything.

A sort of speeding up of the old style working in series to the new energy of working in parallel.

Sales departments have exhibited much trouble entertaining such an idea.

Want prospects to make a decision, then get ’em all in the same room, and thrash it out. Anything else would be ceding control, elongating bids and a general dereliction of duty.

You ever sell in the zone of decisions already made before a rubber-stamping meeting was held?

Time to dust off that handbook chapter.

Useful too if you yourself or people you trust ever worked in the kind of telesales that emerged post the dotcom boom of the dawning Millennium for non-commodity solutions.

There’s plenty of async type tasks you’ll be used to.

The one-on-one relationship build chats.

The to and fro of uncovering specific buyer hot buttons.

The back and forth of formal doc finessing.

How are you mapping these out for your hoped for deluge of post-corona deals?

Whatever your process was, it will doubtless need a tweak or two.

Sending slidedecks through unaccompanied. Even videoing yourself delivering a key doc, chart or image. Asking for forms with reams of questions to be filled in.

The rise of level- (aka rank-) selling. Open acceptance of non-attendance at certain buyerside meetings. More exposure provided to delivery resource.

Hard(er)-nosed qualification gateways. Earlier explicit acknowledgement of issue existence and desire to remedy. Full decision-making access across the entire organisation from the outset.

All can have your own video meeting component as thread throughout.

Plan for all these in a virtual setting and you won’t be left trailing in any competitor’s wake once coronavirus restrictions lift.