Expert guidance at every step

To make sure everyone understands the value of change, and is comfortable with it, I like to bring in many people outside of the sales team at different points during the cycle. These include our internal subject matter experts and company leaders who can speak directly to their peers in the prospect organization.

Early on in the sales process I usually bring in someone from our operations or solutions consulting team to help us dig deeply into the prospect’s current vendor payment setup. It helps to learn where the prospect is at, where they’d like to end up, and how our solution can take them there. 

As people start to think about how their process is going to change, I bring in people from implementation, supplier enablement and/or operations. This helps to better explain what the impact will be to their suppliers, and what implementation will look like for their users. Later in the process, I bring in customer success and tech support people to talk about what they can expect after they go live. 

Last year a government subcontractor client of ours was very concerned about risk and about information security. I brought in the head of our information security team to talk to their Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). They spoke each other’s language and our credibility skyrocketed.

The idea behind my process is to provide different perspectives, and to let people talk with others who have insights into their work. Similarly, to many salespeople in this kind of collaborative selling scenario, I act as master of ceremonies, bringing together the right people and putting together the right agenda for each prospect. 

Frequent flyer miles

Before we moved to a more digital sales process, we were racking up those frequent flyer miles. Sometimes we’d fly to a far-away town for one meeting. We might end up spending several days somewhere between travel and meetings, keeping us from other work and costing the company money. We might also do it the other way around, flying prospects to our HQ. Taking up three days of their time, multiplied by however many people they’re bringing out.

We also used to spend a lot of time, effort, and money going to trade shows. We’d ship in booths and equipment and team members to man these booths to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. After a year and a half of remote selling that looks really inefficient, even a bit antiquated.

The only digital part of our sales process was bringing in executives or subject matter experts remotely.

Effective but not efficient

Last year, when I was succeeding at sales without ever leaving the house, I had a lightbulb moment: Do clients even want to have face-to-face meetings?

According to research by McKinsey, more than three quarters of buyers say they now prefer digital self-serve and remote human engagement over face-to-face interactions, even in industries where field sales have long been the norm.

Don’t get me wrong–there’s value in meeting folks face to face, depending on the situation. In-person meetings are especially important for big deals where you need to establish a high comfort level. However, face-to-face sales meetings are a very time consuming, expensive way to sell, not to mention that some of the people you want to have there are going to have to dial in remotely anyhow.

Challenging Sales

Many of us who are in sales practice are at least familiar with The Challenger Sale. In a nutshell, it’s about understanding the customer’s problems, challenging the current way of thinking, and articulating things that they haven’t even thought about. Maybe it’s time to apply those principles to ourselves. We’re selling change to the enterprise, but how much have we changed our own processes in the past decade? 

For example, look at how cars are being sold now. In the old days you’d have to go to the car lot, kick the tires, fill out paperwork, and sit for hours while the salesperson went to the back room and talked to their managers. I bought a lot of cars that way and every time it was an awful experience. Now you can pick out a car online and have it delivered to your home for a test drive. This process update had my gears turning (pun intended).

Better remote selling

It’s time to double down on remote sales and improve our processes. We’ve reached a point where we can sell pretty effectively using videoconferencing technology, but we can do even better. We can work with marketing to help us brand our online presentation materials and backdrops and level up our sound and lighting. We can use time not spent traveling to organize, polish, and practice our presentations and make them better.

Scheduling is the hardest part of team selling, since there can be as many as 10 or 15 people that need to be on the call, but that was hard with in-person selling too. We can use calendar software to help, or hire someone that’s dedicated to helping set up these meetings for the whole sales team. We can make better use of expert and executive time by establishing regular office hours where multiple sales people can bring their prospects to ask questions. We can do more frequent live demos and take questions from the audience. I’ve got a lot of ideas about how to improve remote sales. They’re all absolutely attainable, especially with the time we get back by skipping travel.

A team sport

Enterprise sales is a team sport. People buy from you first. Then they buy from your company and your product, more or less in that order. Personal relationships are primary, regardless of whether you’re remote or in-person.

I believe that there’s more of an opportunity to make these kinds of connections, and build confidence and trust, remotely. Partially because we already are succeeding at this, and because remote sales are less of an ask on the prospects’ time.

Virtual sales are efficient for sales people too. We can service more customers faster, which helps us accelerate the transition to automated vendor payments, or whatever kind of change for the better, that we’re selling.

The post No More Business As Usual When You Double Down on Remote Sales appeared first on SiteProNews.

Until the 1990s, the accounts payable world harbored paper piles, filing cabinets, and calculators, with most of the work done manually. Toward the end of the last century, ERP systems gained traction in the market. This was the first wave of electronic innovation, and these systems took years to implement, requiring extensive IT resources. Some companies tried implementing electronic invoicing, but it never fulfilled its early promises. Only the largest companies in the world could afford to operate the hardware and software required.

In the early 2000s, we started to see the rise of invoice scanning and workflow systems and cloud-based front-end management systems. These could automate pieces of the AP workflow and integrate with ERP systems, but, again, not without a strain on IT teams to deploy and configure them. Then about 10 or 15 years ago, accounting systems started to move to the cloud. Part of the promise was that it would be faster and easier to deploy—and it was, relative to before. But it was still not quick or easy.

The Final Leg of the Race

Payments are the final component of the AP automation race. Until about a decade ago, if you wanted electronic payments, you would set up an ACH or card program through your bank. That cumbersome process also required IT help to create the specific payment files required by banks.

Today, you can get up and running with automated payments in just a few weeks. But even as awareness for the payment automation solution market grows, companies who might be interested dismiss the possibility out of hand, based on negative past experiences. They think the implementation will be a big IT project—that it’ll take months to complete, and that it will be expensive and disruptive. They may also assume they’ll need to hire an outside consultant, just like they did with previous automation projects.

Once implemented, the idea of maintaining such a robust software—meeting bank and card providers’ file transmission requirements, and handling ongoing supplier enablement and support, for example—became far too intimidating. Those are jobs in and of themselves, and most companies don’t have the time to jump through those hoops while maintaining their check program.

Some companies who have tried card or ACH programs scrap the effort and go back to writing checks. It might be manual, but they only have to manage one workflow.

These earlier automation efforts were so punishing that there’s a healthy amount of skepticism about undertaking anything new. Even though younger companies have perfected the automation process, their potential clients are so tired of trying to get programs off the ground that they’re not interested in hearing another pitch.

The Advancement of ERP Integrations

I’m here to tell you that implementing payment automation today is much easier than 15 or 20 years ago. The most significant change is the streamlined ERP systems’ integration capabilities. Unlike banks, you don’t have to provide files in a unique format to get started—most payment solutions can build the solution around your existing files. In other words, payment automation providers keep it simple.

By using the payment information that your ERP provides, the deployment barrier is broken down. It’s so easy to get started. Even the most complex enterprise systems with multiple bank accounts can get started in around eight weeks and with minimal IT and tech resource involvement. Companies with fewer bank accounts can even be up and running in as few as four weeks.

AP is one of the last areas that businesses have to automate. For decades, technology built for AP functions was minimal—even laughable. Early adopters—those who got involved in the first waves of automation—have the scars to prove it. Their negative experiences have compounded into the belief that software implementation—even cloud software—is difficult and not worth the time. These days that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The post The New Truth of Updating Your Payment Processes appeared first on SiteProNews.