Public-Facing Sales Leaders vs. Closers: Practical Game Plan to Be Both

Author: Julia Nimchynska

It’s difficult to argue with the fact that the business landscape is changing. The way consumers buy has evolved, driven by the arrival of new technology and unpredictable challenges. More often than not, your consumers aren’t interacting with sales professionals in person. Agents are spending more time online, but they’re also struggling to perform at their most efficient levels.

According to the fourth edition of Salesforces’ State of Sales report, sales reps only spend around 34% of their selling time. The rest of their moments go towards tasks like prospecting, finding information, and meeting with clients.

Examining Salesforces’ research and the marketplace as it stands today, we can see that the playbook for successful sales is changing. Team leaders can’t just be back-end closers anymore. They need to be motivators, empowering, and driving the sales reps towards success.

Leaders also need to be social innovators, attracting new clients, and interacting with them in the public, virtual world.

Here’s your game plan for the new era of sales.

Step 1: Assessing the New Sales Landscape

Since the advent of the modern business, sales strategies have always adapted to suit the changing needs of customers. For a while, things seemed to be evolving smoothly. We could see consumers gradually changing their preferences to the digital world, and companies could ease into the virtual landscape alongside them.

Unfortunately, when 2020 arrived, bringing with it a global transformation, the evolution of sales suddenly peaked. Within days, 79% of sales reps said that they had to quickly adapt to new ways of selling, much faster than ever before.

As customers have stumbled nervously into a marketplace that’s almost entirely digital, they’re turning to businesses for insights into who they can trust. Your clients need to see that you’re confident and prepared in this new virtual landscape, so that they can rely on your guidance. This forces leaders to be both public-facing presences, and closers behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, most sales reps are contending with a flood of changes simultaneously, from new methods of selling to new metrics and responsibilities.

The only way to thrive in this new landscape is to understand it.

According to Salesforce, reps believe that the most significant factors impacting current economic conditions are:

• Increased importance of relationships with clients (86%) 
• Increased demand for trust before a sale (83%) 
• Greater need for trust after a sale (80%) 
• New sales success metrics (72%) 
• New job responsibilities (64%)

So, what does this mean to your sales playbook?

Step 2: Building Better Relationship with Clients

For years now, we’ve seen that relationships make a huge difference to the success of any company. All consumers want to see evidence that the companies they buy from understand them and respect their needs. This means that you need to get to know your customer before you begin the sales experience. More than ever, 88% of reps say that current economic conditions mean that it’s more important to anticipate customer needs.

So, how do you get to a point where you can detect and even predict what your customer wants? The first step is accessing the right technology. Start with research, gathering as much data as possible about the target audience that you want to reach. Both sales leaders and reps need access to in-depth buyer personas that help with seeing the landscape through the buyer’s eyes.

CRM systems and AI solutions are becoming more prominent within the sales toolkit, alongside comprehensive sales engagement systems that offer a deep-dive view of the customer journey. The more information you collect from your potential customers, the easier it will be to figure out what they need from your brand. Remember, your sales playbooks need input from everything from your emails with customers, to your social media conversations.

Make sure that you and your teams understand how to monitor information properly. You’ll need to consider both macro developments in the international and national news and micro trends on things like LinkedIn, industry forums, and even your unique conversations with clients.

Step 3: Creating Trust Before the Sale

Once you’ve got the information you need to build stronger relationships with clients, the next step is figuring out how to cultivate trust before the sale. The ability of sales leaders to become both behind-the-scenes closers and public-facing presences is essential here. In a world where there are countless options to choose from, your B2B consumers won’t be ready to spend immediately. However, 76% of consumers say that they feel ready to engage in social conversations.

Building the right social presence is an excellent way to give your customers human faces that they can connect with. After all, your clients don’t trust faceless companies – they trust other people. As the largest social networking site for businesses, LinkedIn is the go-to environment where most leaders will need to begin building their presence.

In 2019, studies found that 71% of decision-makers believe in the benefits of social media when choosing a new product for their company. Around 5 out of 10 decision-makers happily turn to LinkedIn when looking for new services. To create trust before the sale, leaders will need to establish a voice in the digital landscape where their customers can find them.

According to Dale Dupree, your social presence is a pivotal tool in the current sales journey. Consumers that want to learn more about the trustworthiness and credibility of a brand start by looking at their leaders on social media. They want to see what the people behind the company is like, and in this regard, a sales proposal just won’t work.

A strong LinkedIn presence that includes thought leadership content, careful conversations with clients, and even links to case studies could be essential in gaining the trust you need.

Step 4: Maintaining Trust During and After the Sale

Trust is at the heart of the sales landscape today. When clients can’t interact with companies on a face-to-face basis, it isn’t easy to build crucial human connections. That’s why so many companies are turning to things like video conferencing to replicate the in-person interactions we’re used to.

The important thing to remember in the current landscape, is that trust isn’t just something you need to build before the sale. It’s something that business leaders and their reps need to maintain all the way through the buyer journey. This means thinking about: 

• Awareness /Consideration: In the buyer journey’s initial stages, your customer needs as much information about you as possible. Social media is an excellent place to build initial connections with customers and maintain their attention. You can publish thought leadership content that highlights the benefits of your business and interact with clients through instant chat and messaging. With social tools, you can make sure the answers to your customer’s questions are already available to access online.  
• Action: During the action stage of the buying journey, it’s important for sales leaders and reps to find the right balance between process and autonomy. There’s no one-size-fits-all process today. That’s why sales organizations are giving their reps more freedom. Having a sales playbook in place with useful suggestions is helpful. However, it’s important to ensure that team members have the freedom to adapt the sales journey to suit the customer’s specific needs.  
• Loyalty: After the sale, the conversation with the client can continue in this new digital environment. Leaders can pass follow-up processes over to other members of staff who can ensure ongoing success for customers. Making sure your customers are happy means that they’re more likely to stick with you in the long-term. They may even share their thoughts on social media, and therefore attract new clients through advocacy too.

Embedding social media strategies into the new game plan will be a powerful way to update every part of the trust-building process for your company. However, you’ll need to ensure that all members of staff know how to use these social elements properly, from the leader, to the customer success agent.

Step 5: Tracking and Measuring Success

The new sales landscape comes with new success metrics to consider and track. This often means investing in new technology that will support a more informed workforce. As consumers find more channels and platforms they can use to interact with companies, businesses need a way of bringing data from every conversation together.  

Artificial Intelligence tools are gaining more maturity in the market to help with this data collection and management strategy. AI tools can sort through information much faster than any standard employee, leveraging actionable insights from streams of otherwise meaningless data. Additionally, AI can also help with forecasting and understanding sales opportunities.  

The arrival of intelligence in the sales landscape isn’t replacing human talent. Instead, AI extends human performance, and helps to support teams in connecting with customers on every channel. It also means that as your conversations with your clients evolve, you can collect more valuable information that will lead to better, more customized sales in the future.  

New technology can also assist with automating certain parts of the tracking and measuring journey for team members. According to the Salesforce report mentioned above, today’s reps have a much longer list of job responsibilities to consider. As well as maintaining customer relationships, they’re also responsible for logging data and notes, managing administrative tasks, and generating proposals. With AI, companies can automate things like: 

• Collecting conversational data 
• Logging quotes and proposals 
• Prioritizing lead opportunities 
• Assigning specific team members to accounts 
• Determining which action to take next in a sales journey 

All the while, AI tools are constantly gathering data that tells business leaders if they’re hitting the right targets for metrics like customer satisfaction score and first-time issue resolution.

Step 6: Responding to Changing Roles

The new era of sales is transforming not just the way that companies interact with clients but the responsibilities that professionals must take on to make sales successful. Just as reps now have more tasks to consider, the roles of today’s leaders are changing too. Aside from closing deals behind the scenes and setting up training support for employees, leaders also need to be public-facing entities for the businesses that they represent.

According to Richard Harris, today’s executives can’t be “true leaders” if they can’t create a social presence and work behind the scenes at the same time. Seismic social and economic shifts are forcing leaders to rethink the way they work and consider how they can make time for building suitable social presences. The key to success, according to Lori Richardson, is making sure that sales leaders have the right levels of support.

To ensure that leaders are making the right impact in the customer-facing world, they need access to plenty of data gathered by customer engagement tools, CRMs, and other essential software. Leaders need access to comprehensive buyer personas, and even available content that they can share when they’re low on inspiration. As David Dulany notes, it’s much easier to document than create. This means that leaders may be able to work better in a social environment if they can talk about the projects they’re working on, rather than telling brand-new stories.

A social presence is quickly becoming a must-have for today’s sales leadership team. However, these professionals need to remember that they’re still responsible for steering their colleagues towards a brighter future too. We’re sure to see a period of transition as leaders learn how to navigate the world behind and in front of the business curtain.

The Changing State of Sales

As Salesforce shows with it’s latest report, the environment for sales is changing, and no-one can afford to be left behind the curve. In a world where physical presence isn’t possible, companies must be ready to interact in a new social landscape. Companies need to prepare their teams with the right buyer personas to create deeper relationships with clients through digital screens.

We need to learn how to develop trust before a sale with the right social content and presence, and how to maintain that trust with ongoing strategies for interaction. At the same time, business leaders and their teams need a way to track the success of various purchasing journeys and sales strategies. Artificial Intelligence and automation will clear away some of the extra work placed on top of professionals as roles begin to change.

For the modern sales team, job responsibilities are changing at every level. Agents are working more closely with technology at the back-end, while leaders are taking a stance in the customer-facing landscape, building human identities that customers can connect with.

The companies that can adapt to this new landscape will be the ones that thrive. The question is, are you ready for the shift?

Julia loves all things innovation, productivity, and tech. Currently, she’s helping companies increase their ROE (Return on Customer Engagement) at revenuegrid.com