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We believe this is the most exciting time to be in sales since the advent of CRM systems in the early 2000s.
Modern salespeople that commit to cultivating their essential virtual meeting skills will achieve more success, faster and more efficiently than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a matter of months, companies have learned to negotiate a new normal, recalibrate their strategies, and shift primarily to a remote sales model to adapt their business model to COVID-19.
Going all-remote for many sales organizations has posed a new set of challenges for sales teams that have been accustomed to a physical in-person meeting to establish and strengthen customer relationships.
Some of the critical attributes to Master virtual meetings:
– Selling with video and web conferencing is powerful, efficient, and effective but, it’s not as simple as turning on a camera and smiling
– Learning how to use technology is relatively easy
– The transformation to mastery takes time, and it is a “team sport.”
– The adoption curve is a matter of psychological acceptance
– Call (virtual meeting) planning is more intense than in-person meetings
Here are the initial steps:
Virtual Meetings Essentials
Adapting Your Business Model to COVID-19: Tips to Master Virtual Selling Skills
1 – Call It What It Is
Virtual meetings are not “calls”. They are meetings via a Video or Web Conference platform. Calls can never be face-to-face, but meetings can be. It may seem like a nit, but it will make a difference in how you think and prepare for virtual meetings.
2 – Virtual Meetings Require More Planning
Virtual meetings require more up-front planning and rehearsal than physical in-person meetings.
Orchestrating content and screen sharing hand-offs, syncing virtual cues, assigning roles & responsibilities, and technology features to enable, to name a few, require practice, confidence, and experience.
When you are in a physical meeting room, you can observe everyone’s body language and facial gestures.
It’s a challenge to do in virtual meetings when someone is presenting (as the presentation takes up most of the screen), or if your conferencing platform limits the number of attendees that can be seen at one time.
3 – Practice With Internal Virtual Meetings
Internal meetings are ideal for sales and support teams to practice and rehearse virtual meetings. Exploring web-conferencing features (e.g., polls, whiteboarding, audience feedback, annotations, breakout rooms) should not be left to external virtual meetings.
Insist on video for internal virtual meetings! If your company has not yet developed a culture for video meetings, the sales and support teams will struggle with external virtual meetings.
4 – Engaging Attendees In A Virtual Meeting Requires New Skills
Sharing your screen, or a PowerPoint presentation will not engage the meeting attendees. Using conferencing platform features such as Polls, Whiteboarding, Breakout Rooms, Annotations, etc. are proven ways to engage your audience.
Call on individuals to speak when asking questions, which avoids awkward silences, people taking over each, and keeps them engaged.
5 – Invest In The Right Audio
The webcam or internal laptop microphones can “boom” your voice to attendees.
A good headset with a boom mic, a lavalier mic, or podcasting microphone add intimacy to your voice and the meeting as if you were there in-person. The right audio set-up also reduced ambient noise.
6 – Plan for Disaster
Technology challenges occur regularly during virtual meetings. If they happen at the start of the virtual meeting and you can’t get them resolved in the first five minutes, be prepared to move to an audio-only option.
Appoint a team member to work with attendees that encounter issues after the meeting starts. If you are leading the call, you don’t want to start the meeting to deal with technical problems.
The virtual meeting trend is not temporary. Instead, researchers and practitioners indicate it will be the primary selling method from now on. Adapting Your Business Model to COVID-19 is the new normal.
The extent that we orchestrate a precision interaction via virtual meetings shows clients and prospects that your company will treat their business with the same amount of precision and care. Mastering essential virtual meeting skills takes time and involves the entire sales and support teams. There is no time to waste!
If you’re looking for Marketing Crisis Management Tips, Work-from-Home Tips, Business Improvement Tips, Digital Event Tips, or Sales Transformation Tips to help you strategize your coronavirus plan B, look no further.
For more Tips on Adapting Your Business Model to COVID-19, Click Here to Subscribe to Two-Bullet-Tuesday