Nowadays virtual meetings have become a crucial part of doing business. In this Expert Insight interview hosted by John Golden, Katrina Cravy discusses how to improve your virtual sales presence.
This interview discusses:
- How to own the situation
- How to embrace the situation
Own it
Many sales representatives are trained to walk into the room full of confidence and dominate the situation. But, when the situation calls for the virtual meeting, then the fear of technology comes into play. Usually, lack of tech-savvy and good equipment bring fear, but people also become much more self-aware. However, virtual sales can create greater connectivity with the people once when people get relaxed and start to own the situation. The key is to switch the camera on so that the people can connect a face with the voice. There is a 7-38-55 rule for the successful sale. Seven percent is what you are saying, 38 percent is your tone, and 55 percent represents your body language. The main mistake management and leadership make is that they invest a lot of money in software to put their people online, but they do not invest in teaching them how to act in front of a camera. It takes a lot of practice for a person to get trained and comfortable enough to make a good value proposition on Zoom calls and to earn a customer’s trust. Furthermore, the luxury of having a dedicated home office is beneficial, but the environment seen on camera can easily be made presentable by branding. Having uniforms with a company logo is always a great idea.
Embrace it
The constant repetitions of a script help the salespeople to better present their material in a specific period of time, but salespeople have to remember not to lose the natural flow of a conversation. Storytelling is always a better alternative than just offering statistical details to the customers. Storytelling offers the ability for a better connection between the participants. In addition, people remember more when somebody tells them a story rather than telling them statistical details simply because stories can bring emotions in people. The key is to make your customer comfortable while making yourself memorable to the customer. There are art and science components of the sales process. The science parts are message alignment, first impression, and delivery. The art components are empathy, authenticity, and confidence level. The biggest value comes from empathy and from listening to your clients to understand what they really want. And lastly, embrace and enjoy virtual sales because positive thoughts will make the job easier and more productive. Do not look at virtual meetings as unfortunate circumstances but as a more effective way of doing business. For example, virtual meetings eliminate travel and exhaustion, thus they save time and money.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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