How to Transit your Sales Team to a Work-from-Anywhere Environment

As remote work becomes more and more common, driven by surges in technology and events like the COVID-19 lockdowns, companies are looking to apply the remote approach to sales and customer service.

If you can transit your team to a work-from-anywhere environment, you’ll be able to access a whole new market and benefit from the many advantages of a location-independent sales strategy.

In this article, we’ll explore those benefits and how to get started. To start, let’s look at the idea of Conversational Sales — a crucial part of doing remote sales.

What is Conversational Sales?

Conversational Sales is an approach to selling that focuses on building relationships online, using a variety of different channels to create a smooth, ongoing customer experience.

Since it’s built for the digital world, it’s the perfect framework for a work-from-anywhere sales strategy.

It’s a way of connecting your brand with customers on your website in real-time. A conversational approach to selling combines tools like chatbots and live video broadcasts to imitate real conversations.

This helps businesses apply the personal, conversation-based nature of real-life sales to the digital environment.

But how does Conversational Sales compare to traditional methods?

Traditional Sales vs Conversational Sales

First, let’s take a look at some of the drawbacks of traditional sales:

• It’s an industry with high attrition and low salaries, making it tough to attract and keep talent

• It requires expensive infrastructure like large offices and lots of equipment

• Scalability is difficult

• Conversion rates tend to be low, and bad customer experiences are common

Here’s how Conversational Sales can improve on that:

• Reps can be based at home or in a retail store, allowing for more flexibility and freedom, attracting the most talented staff

• It’s 100% cloud-based, using AI-powered tools to deliver top performance

• Scalability is high, and salaries are performance-based

• Conversion rates tend to be high, and great customer experiences are common

It’s clear that Conversational Sales has an edge over traditional sales, and that’s only going to get bigger as we enter an increasingly digital and remote work environment.

Let’s dive into the benefits of Conversational Sales in a bit more detail. 

The Benefits of Conversational Sales

Teams Can Work from Home

Working from home is fast becoming the norm in lots of industries. 5 million employees (3.6% of the total workforce) now work from home, and many more do it on at least a regular basis.

Get Ahead of the Competition

Adopting Conversational Sales allows brands to seize an important advantage.

84% of today’s consumers are disappointed in the digital services offered by brands. 

“Low-effort interaction” costs a business 37% less than a high-effort one, involving things like channel switching and repeat interactions, and this is a common cost-saving tactic that ruins the customer experience.

Brands can surge ahead and impress customers by using Conversational Sales to deliver impactful experiences throughout the customer journey.

More Effective Sales

Conversational Sales helps you differentiate your brand from the competition. It avoids friction points like request forms and delivers a real ‘wow’ factor — interacting with customers in real-time.

The best conversational approaches use a range of online tools to deliver a truly rewarding experience.

The results of this:

• Better online conversion rates

• Improved customer experiences

• Shorter sales cycles

Conversational Sales Across Different Industries

Conversational Sales can work for almost any industry, but the advantages can be a little different for each one. Here are some of the industries that can benefit:

• Auto companies can benefit from virtual showrooms and home-based agents, selling their products from a distance to people far away

• Telco companies can use virtual shops to deliver a better, remote customer experience

• The insurance industry can use virtual agents to raise claims online

• Banks can go beyond mobile apps, using virtual bankers to deliver a rich online experience

How to Use Remote Agents

Here are a few different possibilities for using remote agents in your business.

Showrooms and stores

Sometimes it can be difficult for your customers to reach your physical stores or showrooms. They might live hundreds of miles away, or be busy with work, or simply dislike busy shopping environments.

This is where remote agents can play an important role. You can connect your web visitors to sales agents in physical stores in real-time. This allows you to boost operational efficiency and minimize missed sales opportunities.

Connecting Dealerships with Home-Based Agents

This is where agents do their job from their own home or from a real dealership via remote technology.

It’s an approach that works for everyone.

• Customers get best-in-class customer service in real-time, with an advisory approach delivered by professionals wherever they are.

• The brand is able to keep control over communication and sales.

• Dealerships get highly qualified leads.

Call Centers

Call centers can transform existing workflows into conversations. This helps them classify and qualify clients quickly online and connect them to call center agents based on their business rules.

We can all agree that life after Coronavirus will never be the same. Sales leaders need to find a way to mitigate the danger of office settings amid the pandemic outbreak such as Covid-19. 

Business Insider article recently published how a South Korean call center’s aggressive response after one worker tested positive allowed health authorities to quickly identify other cases and tell anyone exposed to self-isolate, thereby mitigating transmission. Call-centers are inherently close quarters, especially given the long periods of time employees spend near each other, and can easily allow the virus to spread.

Enabling your call center agents to work from anywhere can mitigate business risk, build resilience for your company, and prepare it for unforeseeable events, such as a pandemic.

Home-based agents

With an increasingly remote workforce, it’s becoming easier to connect online customers to home-based sales agents with just a few clicks, delivering effective customer service regardless of location.

Shifting to a work-from-anywhere style is a great way to seize the advantages of remote work and connect with your customers in a more meaningful way wherever your sales teams are based.

To find out how Whisbi can help you implement a Conversational approach to sales and marketing and drive a location-independent strategy, contact us today.

Louis Moran

Louis is a copywriter and content strategist with several years of experience in tech and digital marketing. He uses content to communicate Whisbi's message and educate readers about how our products can make a difference.