For anyone who has worked in sales for a long time and is used to “hitting the road” to go to visit customers, the last year has been incredibly difficult. Not least because sales people tend to be outgoing, extrovert and enjoy meeting people. The lack of personal interaction takes away some of the great pleasures of the job.
Every business has had to adapt to working virtually, with many offices closed or only partly staffed. The expectations are that this will continue long after the pandemic, with many more people working from home more of the time. Selling has had to adapt to this new way of working and we will need to continue to adapt as we go forwards. Having spent a year having online meetings, here’s my take on what you need to think about for sales online meetings.
In some respects, having online meetings is a good thing. I would quite often go into London for a one hour meeting. The travel time for that meeting would be 3-4 hours, depending on how I got to the station and where the meeting was. While I tried to arrange 2 or 3 meetings in a day, that was not always possible and so this was a great time commitment for a one hour meeting. With online meetings, I can now have 4 or 5 meetings in a day and be so much more productive. With the customer’s permission, I can record each session so that I have a complete record of what was said.
There are some downsides to online meetings. If you have never met the customer before, it is much harder to build rapport online. There are no offline chats while you are getting coffee, no post meeting discussions on the way back to reception. Everything is a little more formal. As a result, it can be much harder to build trust with your potential customer. This is something that you therefore have to work much harder at doing. Explain to your customer that you would like to spend some time getting to know each other. Tell them your back story and ask them for theirs. Ensure that you have more dialogue rather than presentation.
Question and answer time should be longer than normal. Typically, much of your communication is non-verbal. With virtual meetings, much of this communication is lost so you will need to try to make up for it with verbal communication. This will require a bit more planning and preparation for the meeting. Plan more questions and think more about your follow up questions so that you can prompt your customer for more information during the conversation.
You will also need to practise active listening much more actively! When your customer can only see your head and shoulders, your body language has much less impact on the conversation. You will therefore need to be much more animated in your facial expressions, verbal prompts and further questions to encourage your customer to talk more.
Now that we have spent most of the year working online only, there is now an expectation that online meetings are much more professional. While it may have been reasonable to work out of your bedroom with a dodgy background at the start, that is not reasonable any more. We need to be respectful of our customer and present a professional background and tools when having a meeting. If you have not learnt how to use Zoom, GTM, Teams etc, this is something that you need to get better at. There should be no excuse any more for being on mute when you go to speak, or not knowing how to share your screen. Look at your background and see if it is professional. Use a branded virtual background if you can, to avoid distracting images.
Beyond meetings, there are many other ways that selling has changed as a result of the pandemic. I’ll write more about that next week.