As B2B buyers have grown more sophisticated, selling has become more challenging. These challenges are amplified in the COVID-19 economy, where sellers have to work smarter to capture remote buyers’ attention and keep it. For sellers to deliver their sales stories in a way that resonates with modern buyers and maximize return on investment, sales organizations need inspiring content. Isabelle Papoulias, CMO, Mediafly, talks about how companies can improve the quality and usefulness of their content while reducing wasted spending on content creation that rarely helps sales close deals.
2020 dramatically impacted every part of the selling process. In this remote environment where sophisticated B2B buyers have grown even harder to engage, sellers struggled without face-to-face interactions to maintain their customers’ attention throughout the buying journey.
Almost 70% of salespeople do not believe remote selling is as effective as in-person sales, according to a recent Business 2 Community surveyOpens a new window . That is because they know that customers are more likely to be distracted or to multitask in a remote context instead of focusing on your message. Sellers and marketers must rethink sales presentations and content to better capture attention and keep buyers inspired and engaged. To successfully do this, adding visual storytelling elements such as animations and interactivity can go a long way in making a sales presentation or website ebook work harder.
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2021 could bring its own set of setbacks, but remote selling is not going anywhere soon. Here are some ways animated or interactive content can help in capturing remote buyers’ attention:
Simplifies the Sales Story
When it comes to marketing or selling a product, it is easy to forget that while we are experts of our own product, our buyers are not. Because of this, a seller’s initial explanation or content descriptions of the product can be confusing for buyers, leading to questions and a longer sales process.
The old KISS business principle comes to mind here, standing for “keep it simple and straightforward.†It speaks to the role interactive content plays in sales presentations. Interactive content allows sellers to take complicated information and communicate it in a straightforward, visually appealing way. Visual storytelling contains format, simplicity, and chronology that is appealing to buyers. It also allows sellers to easily integrate relevant examples that make sales stories more relatable to unfamiliar audiences.
Empowers Sellers To Influence Objectives
When reading a book, a reader’s imagination runs wild and forms their own opinions and perceptions about the characters and storyline. But, if a person is watching the movie before reading the book, they will imagine the book’s characters as the actors and actresses in the movie. By seeing everything about the characters, including their body language and general demeanor — in the movie first, a person’s whole opinions and perceptions will be significantly influenced before even reading the book.
This concept is also true when sales content is put into a visual format. With visual content, sellers can influence the buyers more than they would with standard, static content. In other words, it helps them control the narrative because the story is built in a visual way intended to draw the buyer in. When sellers use interactive content in their sales interactions, buyers will naturally react and engage with precisely the information you want them to, leading them to your aimed objective.
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Improves the Buyer-Seller Dynamic
Buyers do one of the two things when a traditional, boring PowerPoint slide is put in front of them: completely zone out or read it while the seller is talking. No matter what, you have likely already lost your buyer’s attention. Using interactive content, however, greatly enhances buyer-seller interactions. While the animations are loading, sellers have the opportunity to catch their breath, and the buyers have time to fully process the information they are given. Some ways to make presentations more interactive are adding dynamic graphics, transitions, and call-outs, guided selling tools like questionnaires and ROI calculators, and on-screen animations. Consider dividing big presentations into vignettes — small stories of one or a few slides each — centered around a point of view, challenge, use case, solution, and/or success story.
Such changes will go a long way towards capturing the buyer’s attention, keeping it by making it easier to absorb the content, and driving continuous engagement.
Luckily for both sellers and prospects, the shift to remote sales has made traditional, long sales presentations with 100 slides a thing of the past. Interactive contentOpens a new window is the key to every sales story. The evolved way to get buyers to “YES,†is simple: be visual, short, and interactive.