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How the Right Presentation Platform can Evolve Virtual Selling
With social distancing measures still in place and office returns in flux, sales and marketing teams around the world are turning to virtual selling environments.
This represents a fundamental disruption to most revenue teams, but a cutting edge technology stack can lead to some semblance of “business as usual” and offer alternatives to basic presentation tools like PowerPoint.
Communications tools like the instant messaging service Slack and the videoconferencing platform Zoom have already become office staples.
The utility of such platforms gets to the heart of one of the problems organizations of all sizes face now that the bulk of U.S. workers — some 90% are fully remote: Maintaining a solid virtual selling environment while maintaining internal collaboration.
A tech stack built around virtual selling, collaboration and engagement has never been more vital. Fortunately, the same principles that fueled the adoption of Slack and Zoom can be applied to the current pain points facing sales reps and marketers.
Just as companies are integrating communications tools more fully into their technology stacks to facilitate virtual selling, an online virtual selling and collaboration platform can provide a critical solution for sales and marketing teams looking to stay on the same page in this new selling environment. A recent McKinsey study showed that more than 90% of sales teams have pivoted to full or partial virtual selling and will sustain this for 12+ months post pandemic.
Fortunately, a variety of options exist that solve for many of these pain points, from free solutions to more sophisticated platforms suitable for creating a full virtual selling experience and engaging prospects.
For example, DIGIDECK — a staple in the Experience Selling space — revolves around a singular template that incorporates various aspects of a client’s brand and accelerates the creation of presentations for web-based virtual selling. Meanwhile, a built-in content library helps keep teams on brand and solves the issue of huge files sizes. A salesperson or marketing professional using a cloud-based presentation platform would not, for example, need to wait around downloading large files over a slow home internet connection.
Brand control, a critical pain point in even the most collaborative selling environments, stands to become even more cumbersome in the current virtual selling mode. And while maintaining updated logos and other branding in a cloud-based filing system is a tactic for marketing teams to help facilitate virtual selling, distorted logos and incorrect color schemes remain a headache. Maintaining an updated content library within a virtual selling presentation platform will help alleviate the issue.
Cloud-based presentation platform functionality such as DIGIDECK Live are offering sales and marketing professionals the opportunity to expand their virtual selling strategies out to prospect engagement with Chat and Zoom-like features built right into the platform. This additional technology offers revenue teams the ability to customize the buying journey for their prospects. From the same McKinsey study referenced above they point out that companies that provide an outstanding digital customer experience are 2x more likely to be chosen as a supplier.
Businesses have been quick to adopt surface-level communications tools, but as the current business environment continues to necessitate work from home measures, tools like these that enable greater levels of collaboration and engagement stand to become just as important.
