Tips to help tweak the virtual sales process
One of the challenges with selling in an international marketplace is creating and sustaining a relationship with a prospective client even though you may never meet them face-to-face before they purchase your product or service. Anyone who has made a substantial purchase in their life knows how much a human touch can help when working through the buying process. Whether it’s a car, house, mutual fund or suit you’re buying, the relationship you have with the salesperson can obviously influence how comfortable you feel. Not saying that the sales person will single handedly make or break the deal as the product and service plays a larger role in this. But a confident, friendly and helpful person can go a long way to help steer and navigate the process as you make your decisions and think through options.
The fact that many companies in Waterloo Region and other tech centers around the world sell web-based offerings can make the in-person meeting unnecessary and difficult to coordinate. Take Athena for instance. We can be approached by a prospect in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, California and Ukraine all in the same day, and we often do. Instead of having a representative in each country that could make a sales presentation in person at some point, we utilize some effective tools to ensure we can create rapport without having to board a plane.
GoTo Meeting
One tool that most people are somewhat familiar with is GoTo Meeting. We use GoTo Meeting for every demonstration of our product and follow up meeting that may be required afterwards. For those who aren’t familiar with this product, GoTo allows us to share our screen to show our software in a live environment, along with a live video and audio stream so clients can see that we are actually humans and not simply a recording. Often prospective clients will want to click around on the screen and get a feel for certain aspects of the software, or show parts of their current set-up, which is easy through the ability to switch presenters, mid-session. The system is flexible so that users can either access the presentation through computer audio/video or by calling in by a landline or cell phone.
The Set
One of the most recently adopted pieces to our demonstration process is the consistent use of the webcam during the presentation. There are a variety of stats that can confirm that the use of a webcam for a presentation will increase the rapport with a prospect simply because we all identify with human faces and emotions.
We took our set-up one step further and splurged on a quality microphone and camera lighting so that the sound and video quality is top notch. Although the camera on our computer isn’t winning any short film awards anytime soon, it gets the job done. Lastly, we also installed some Athena blue backing and Penelope signage so that our background is clean, consistent with the brand and not too distracting. Again, by no means do these details make or break the sale, but the overall environment that the prospective client lives in during the sales (visual ques, sound quality, lighting, background noise) process will subtly influence their state, which always has an effect on outcomes.
We set all of these elements up in a room that we’ve since deemed the “Dreamatorium”. Perhaps a cheesy name, but the room itself has a closed door, window for natural light, blackboard for brainstorming and sound foam to help the quality of our presentations. The fact that there is no background noise during our demonstrations instantly removes the feel of a “call center” or mass production facility. I’m not sure about you, but anytime I’ve talked with anyone where there are other calls in the background brings a negative connotation to the sale and distracts me from the conversation at hand.
We understand that client meetings can’t always be set up in such a library-esque environment, as staff often work from remote settings. But if we can, we try and dot our I’s and cross our t’s as over a 9-12 month sales cycle, these subtle details can add up and be the difference maker in a decision between several product options.