Over the last six months, carriers have faced the biggest disruption to their sale processes they’ve ever faced. In a market that has long been driven by personal relationships and in-person meetings, sales teams have had to re-evaluate how they sell and look at new ways to engage and nurture prospects.
Post-COVID some carriers will maintain their legacy sales model of meet and greets, smiling and dialling, and attending as many events as their budget will permit, but that will have a cost. If they don’t evolve their approach to sales they may get the same results, but it will mean investing in bigger sales teams, more cold calls without capturing intelligence, and depending on events in an uncertain world.
There’s an opportunity to step back and look at what really matters in carrier business in 2020. Carriers want to buy from people that can offer more than just A to B connectivity. They want partners that understand the entire value chain, all the way to the end users. They want partners that offer real insights as well as streamlined experiences that are shaped to their needs.
One customer is looking for a low or no-touch approach while others want a consultative sale. Adaptability, visibility and intelligence needs to be built into the process and it has to work remotely.
That said, we’ve put together a list of sales tools that are enabling carriers to sell more solutions, capture new intelligence and really understand and nurture their customers.
- Prospecting – LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a no-brainer for B2B sales teams. When Sales Navigator is combined with email identification provided by Hunter.io, carriers can identify new opportunities and immediately reach out. Sales teams can be continually building new contacts, organising leads and populating the carrier’s CRM.
- Rapid Outreach – Sales teams can build banks of email templates that are commonly used in their outreach to prospects, existing customers and a whole range of segments. Sharing helpful content, pricing sheet updates or cold intro templates can be saved in HubSpot and personalised before they’re sent. This means the sales team can move quickly to engage with customers and have more touchpoints with more prospects and customers in a day.
- Automated Workflows – Email templates can be made into automated “sequences” that set in motion a chain of emails and actions when a contact is enrolled. This means a sequence can be created by an agency that then triggers actions for the sales team to take like “Intro Email” + “LinkedIn Connection” + “Follow-Up Call” + “Helpful Content Email” + “Proposal Discussion Call.” This can be developed then given to sales team members no matter how new or inexperienced in the process they are. For small companies it means rapidly scaling sales efforts without needing to add more staff.
- Tracking Email Opens – Seeing who and when someone opens your emails can create new opportunities and give the sales team helpful insights. Using HubSpot email tracking, you’re notified every time someone opens your email. This ensures that they’ve received your email and enables you to make a call when you know you have their attention. The sales team can make calls that get a reaction like, “I was just thinking about your pricing” or “I was just going to call you.”
- New Visibility into Shared Proposals – When it comes to proposals and responses to requests, carriers often send out emails then hope for a response. Using HubSpot Documents, they can track who opens the document, what pages or slides they’ve looked at, and for how long. They can see immediately what the customer has fixated on and when they follow-up on a call they can discuss the topics that customers were interested in. They’re one step ahead of the customer because they have more visibility. They no longer have to send off a proposal and simply hope it’s opened.
- Answering Questions and Troubleshooting – In the era of the online procurement portal, answering questions and troubleshooting is essential. Vidyard is a one-to-one video creation tool that makes demoing a solution, troubleshooting a portal issue or walking a prospect through a proposal simple and seamless. You can make videos for a specific contact and quickly make a personal connection even when working remotely. If a carrier is selling a platform, it is perfect for support and creating emails that people open. When you’re working remotely, Vidyard can help you be human and personal while doing sales.
These are just some of the ways carriers can evolve how they sell their solutions. It is really about creating a sales journey for customers and not just capturing leads or doing a hard sell. It is a comprehensive approach to selling solutions that isn’t just about putting numbers in the forecast. This approach can create lasting customers, advocates and long-term partners that will ultimately make the carrier’s business better. Carriers that evolve how they sell will be a step ahead of competitors and they’ll get a bigger return on investment in sales.
Get in touch if you’d like to discuss evolving your sales approach and providing your team with some clever sales tools.