Selling Virtually (Part 2)
Last week I wrote about selling virtually and the way that the pandemic has changed sales meetings. It is possible to have many more meetings in a day now but they are not always of such great quality as we miss so much body language online and the opportunity to learn more about our customer as a person through the pre and post meeting chats. We need to actively listen more and work harder at questioning to get all of the information that we need. This week, we’ll look at some other ways that the pandemic has changed sales.
With everyone online, location is becoming less important. Geography has always been an important factor in sales, whether in defining a territory for a sales person or just limiting our ability to service customers further away. However, with so much now happening online, it is possible to manage and win customers from further afield. My own online training sessions have trained people from all around the world, not something I ever expected a year ago. So, it is important to re-evaluate what a good customer looks like. Think about how much geography has limited you up to now and see if you can relax those limits.
With more meeting time and less travel time, it is possible to have more meetings each day. As a result, the time required to close a sale can decrease significantly. Instead of waiting 3-4 weeks to find everyone’s availability for a meeting, it is possible to arrange a meeting sooner or indeed, have 2 or 3 meetings instead as the time is available. All the results in the sale going through quicker.
However, this only really works when we know the customer. Where we do not have a relationship with the customer, the lack of face to face contact can have a detrimental affect on the sales cycle. It is much more difficult to make contact with potential new customers and even if we do, it will take time to build a level of trust with them. Overall, this may have the effect of concentrating our business with existing customers and preventing us from building market share so easily.
To counter this, we need to spend more time selling socially. This does not mean spending more time on Facebook or Instagram but promoting our business online through educating our customers. I know of a company that has gained many new contacts and connections though its webinar series. These may not be customers today but they have the potential to be customers in the future. The cost of webinars is very low for most businesses so it is a very cheap way of gaining attention and winning new customers.
The additional time that we have from not commuting every day can be used to promote our business online. Send useful information to connections without asking for anything in return. Promote other useful information that may be of value to your customers even if it is nothing to do with your business.
The more that you can do to develop online relationships, the better it will be once things start to return to normal and some face to face meetings are possible. It is not a perfect relationship but it is a relationship and better than starting from scratch. The chances are, all of your competitors are doing this so if you are not, you are going to be left behind.
Everyone has had to adapt to the new environment and it has not been easy. However, like all evolution, those that adapt fastest will be the ones that win and those that fail to adapt will slowly die. Which side of evolution do you want to be on?