Turning traditional to Virtual Sales Call | Best Practices for Virtual Meetings

Turning traditional to Virtual Sales Call | Best Practices for Virtual Meeting

Posted October 22, 2020

Businesses, regardless of their size, never stop to find ways to connect with their customers most possibly and conveniently. This technology era just made it easy for every company to be at the top of their games.

In-person selling is a thing of the past. The fact that shoppers and buyers do not care about generic selling, sales calls come into the picture to transition everything about selling into a productive, virtual setting.

Sales call perhaps is one of the best means of selling products and augmenting sales. It is well anticipated being one of the easiest ways in reaching prospects, but this should not mean that everything is easy about Sales calls.

Like any other format, sales calls require good planning to achieve a successful outcome.

You may have your strategies in leveraging sales calls strategies, but beyond reading this article might give you more insightful strategies that will guide you through your sales call journey.

Sales calls took a sudden turn to digital. But how do you transition from traditional to virtual sales using virtual meetings and other digital material?

What is a Sales call?

Sales calls can be defined on its simple definition as a meeting between the salesperson and its customers to generate transaction sales. Over sales calls, a salesperson can introduce and explain the technicalities and can justify the price of the products.

A salesperson can also justify its edge over other competitors. When the negotiation between the salesperson and the customers are secured, then the sales transaction is completed.

A salesperson can arrange multiple sales call sessions depending on the demands and expectations of the salesperson and the buyer.

The transition from traditional sales call to Virtual or modern

In-person selling has been the ideal approach to selling products. It’s at-least the only format that can satisfy the essence of selling- connection and persuasion.

This gives the salesperson the chance to build a relationship with prospects, give valid instructions in real-time, and can practically assist the customers with illuminating their business challenges. Like every other circumstance, face to face transactions has been the most effective approach to fix them.

But as technology develops, virtual marketing becomes the trend. The long-lasting positive effects of virtual selling decreased deals being made in person and such it benefits all business professionals to be at the top of their games.

Furthermore, as we are in the process of transitioning to virtual marketing, all salespeople should adjust and figure out how to win virtual sales call practices, social networking, and real-time selling. Most importantly, all salespeople should develop the power and ability to make an insightful virtual connection.

Best practices for a virtual sales call

Respect that not everyone is familiar with video calls

Your primary duty is to research your prospects. Your research outcomes should provide you with the most important details about your customers such as what they studied, what school they went to, what their jobs are at their current companies.

This sales call strategy will help you to create solutions that will fit your customers’ demands.

Remember that “details” about your customers shall also include their virtual preferences. It will not only help you to decide which software, channel, and format should be utilized but most importantly your research efforts will make your customers feel valued.

Your basic research should cover the following questions.

Do they prefer video meetings?
Do they have a preferred software or platform? Or your platform will just do?
Are they familiar with the platform systems? Or do they need further guidance from you?
Can their internet connectivity support multiple video call participants?

Be prepared with technical difficulties and preferences

Technical difficulties are indeed inevitable during a presentation but as bad as this might sound you can do prior things that at least can avoid some of these difficulties.

First, you need to prepare all your devices and make sure that they are all charged and in good condition. Check all the mics, audio, and video systems if they are working properly.
Establish a good internet connection. Make sure that you’re in a good spot where you can get a consistent connection.
Bring back-ups such as cell phones, chargers, cords, flash drives, and even pocket wifis.

Choosing the best platform for your virtual event is also a crucial step to achieve a meaningful presentation. JetCall is an ultra-fast broadcasting platform that can benefit every type of business meeting and yes including your business meetings.

JetCall platform makes it easy for salespeople to deliver a meaningful presentation with its advanced features.

JetCall makes it simple for hosts and participants to access virtual meetings on any device.
No download is required. You can host virtual meetings instantly and your participants need not download the platform to attend in your virtual meeting.
JetCall makes it simple to breakout event sessions and makes collaboration easy.

Start the call and share a welcome screen five minutes ahead of time.

You don’t want to start your video meeting with you talking about your product immediately. Prepare a pleasing welcome presentation (might be a video or slides) to let your audience know that they landed on the right event. This welcome presentation will make your event more professional.

Have a plan

Planning is the most crucial step in almost every business event. Without plans, you won’t know where to focus your efforts and what goals you need to achieve.

As such, your virtual event will be a waste of time and effort. Good thing is that you all have the ability and resources to plan your sales call strategies.

Unlike in-person selling where salesperson and customers are negotiating without much distraction, virtual selling is the complete opposite. Virtual prospects usually can be distracted immediately causing them to lose focus on your presentation.

You don’t want this to happen in your event so you have to make your presentation more interesting and engaging.

If you’re doing a recorded presentation, go over it and check where you can cut long, unnecessary clips. You can also provide information that will be hard to miss.
During a live presentation, ask relevant questions and leverage the meeting tools to get and address the inputs from the audience.
Make use of interactive tools such as surveys and polls to keep your audiences’ engagement.

Include a guest moderator

Having a guest moderator is a good start to boost the credibility of your presentation. Your guests can introduce you to the audience and can even interact with you by asking some questions regarding your content. Guests can also justify the quality of your products and can justify your edge over your competitors.

Learn to assess how people and meeting virtually

There are many strategies in keeping the customers engaged in your presentation but developing “Digital Intelligence” is most likely to be the effective one. Digital Intelligence is a basic concept to comprehend.

Observe digital cues and interactions to gauge interests.
Evaluate how a customer is feeling or responding
Get a better understanding of how the meeting is going generally.

Working your “digital intelligence” can be as straightforward as pushing a survey or asking how the customers feel so far about the meeting and content. For instance

Is your audience open to participating in a discussion about their remote or home office?
Do they have good quality audio or is it somewhat rough, prompting possibly missing pieces of the discussions?
Is your audience participating with their video on or turning it off mid-call?

Working out Digital Intelligence is critical for making it comfortable for your audience, while likewise making a relationship, validity, and expanding both of your personal and professional brands.

Remember the 3x rule

Hypothetically, if the audience loses its focus after 15 minutes of listening to a face to face event, then the virtual audience is likely to lose its focus in just 5 minutes. If you usually use 30 words in a slide, you should consider reducing it to 10 words.

Open discussion every six to 10 minutes

It will be boring and uninteresting if you all do the talking, let your audience throw questions, and discuss your response to them in real-time. Don’t wait until the end of the presentation to make inquiries because your audience might forget the questions they just made about a certain topic of your presentation. If your audience doesn’t have questions then let your guest moderator ask you to elaborate more details about your content.

Accelerate the sales cycle without the meeting

Your sales cycle doesn’t just end after your presentation. In fact, you can accelerate your sales process even without a virtual presentation.

Now that your presentation ended and some of your prospects are interested to know more information, you will not just focus on booking another virtual meeting. At least, it’s not just all about booking virtual meetings.

It is tied in with learning more about your prospects and drawing out those problem areas that, perhaps, they’re not ready to impart to you. You have to understand that you need to create experiences that ought to be matched to the various phases of the buying cycle and address common problem areas relevant to your business and applicable to your prospects.

You can likewise display landing pages with video presentations on it relevant to your prospects to help them familiarize your content at their own pace outside of a real-time virtual meeting.

Conclusion

One reason that sales call planning is so significant is because it gives salespeople a background to understanding the buying motives of their prospects. Planning your presentation implies that you can have outlines and summaries that might intrigue prospects.

You might also have the option to identify possible connections between you and your prospects that you can use to build a business relationship quickly and effectively. When you have an important interaction with your prospects, this can either propel the deal or, whenever done inadequately, it can lose the deals.

These significant interactions are so important to plan to satisfy your customers’ expectations.

Dianne Vimmel