06


Q1 • 2021


COVER STORY


HOW MARKETING


By Tim Sweeney


CAN SUPPORT Virtual and Remote Sales Teams


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OVID times mean distant times, and for those charged with bringing in the revenue—yes, we are talking about


salespeople, not marketers—this has ushered in the era of virtual (or remote) selling. While the days of loading up the station wagon and knocking on doors have long passed, sales teams were still in the practice of building relationships through in-person meetings and on-site visits. The inability to now meet face-to-face or even at conferences and trade shows over the past year has forced many sales professionals to adapt in order to survive. It has left a gap in the cycle of prospecting for new clients and maintaining existing relationships.


Thankfully, there are tools and ways to bridge


that gap and areas where marketing can step up to help, which is where Viveka von Rosen comes in. An accomplished speaker and coach on the topic of digital transformation of selling, von Rosen joined us for a virtual sit-down (ironically enough) and dropped some wisdom about how pandemic 2020–2021 has changed B2B sales forever. Even if the “old ways” of site visits and


conferences return, this new norm we are all experiencing will demand that sales professionals possess better digital selling skills and amplified personal branding. Make no mistake: the sales arena has changed forever. “Yes, there are online summits, but those


with LinkedIn Expert and Author Viveka von Rosen


face-to-face conferences are out for a while and, quite frankly, site visits are probably out too,” von Rosen says. “And many of your buyers are working at home, and they’re certainly not going to be comfortable with you coming to their house, so we have to learn how to do this new virtual and remote selling.” Often that remote selling now takes place on


platforms such as Zoom, BlueJeans, Microsoft Office, or Microsoft Teams. Still, to get to that online meeting, sales professionals must now create a unique online presence—starting with a strong LinkedIn profile—and use content that is valued by sales targets to increase engagement with potential buyers. Sales pros, however, are not normally marketing pros, and that valued content has to come from somewhere. Von Rosen says it falls on marketers to create silos of content that lend themselves to individualized conversational opportunities for their sales


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