The best sellers have already been using remote technology successfully for many years. The same reasons they are successful in F2F meetings, is reflected positively in remote meetings. Average and poorly performing sellers are rarely great at running remote meetings.
Now due to the crisis there is a massive need to get everyone in sales organizations up to an adequate level. As a sales leader its your responsibility to ensure every person has key skills needed to succeed at remote selling. My mission for this blog is to help sales leaders instantly raise the level of their sellers.
I will not cover modern basics such as: prospecting with video, social selling etc, which have already been around for 10-15 years. These are obvious things.
I’ve split this blog into a checklist format, so you can quickly do an assessment of how well your salespeople are performing at each of these points.
The first section is about sales meeting fundamentals, which will forever be important. If you or your team members have gaps in any areas, it will reflect negatively into online meetings.
The second section includes specific action points for succeeding at running remote meetings.
Fundamentals of sales meetings
Before the meeting
The agenda is sent in advance before every meeting to all attendees 18-24hrs before the meeting.
Starting the meeting
Time - Decide what time the meeting will end
Set the goal - Set a crystal clear goal with the customer for what you want to achieve during the meeting.
Agenda - Go through what topics need to be covered in order for the meeting goal to be achieved
Your intro - Position yourself as a subject matter expert and your company as a leader in its field
Introductions of others in meeting - Roles and responsibilities
Discovery
Create engaging conversations, by using intriguing insights and questions about how trends and changes in the environment impact the customers business and the decisions they make.
Summarize the discussion
Summarize the most important points uncovered in the discussions, preferably in logical format like this: Goals —> challenges and problems —> options for solving challenges.
Qualify
Depending on the size of the deal it’s always crucial to get a better idea of what needs to happen to reach a final decision and begin the delivery or implementation.
More about qualification in this blog I wrote last year: Qualification methods are misunderstood
Decide next steps
What is our joint next step? Who needs to get involved, when will we meet again and what is the agenda for our next meeting?
What does the customer need to do next? What are we doing next?
After the meeting
Memo - Summary sent to attendees of the findings from the meeting, the decisions made and next steps
LinkedIn invite sent to attendees
If your sellers are sloppy in F2F meetings and don’t lead the discussion very well and create enough value, it will just be worse in remote meetings. Customers will not want to meet them again…
Advanced Remote Selling
There is no technology or specific techniques that make a seller advanced. What makes a successful seller advanced, is their ability to create fantastic engagement with the prospect or customer, even if the meeting is remote.
The goal with the tips in this section is to increase engagement. This is the key to succeeding at remote sales. For this reason, skilled B2B sales professionals who already have engaging conversations with their customers F2F, are in the best position to be effective at remote selling.
Here is a list of ideas of things to look at when evaluating how to improve the remote selling abilities of your team.
Agenda
Normally an agenda is sent 18-24 hours before a meeting, but for remote meetings it also makes sense to send a courtesy agenda 10 minutes before the remote meeting starts, reminding all attendees of the agenda and that the meeting is starting.
Steering the conversation
Use the names of attendees when you want to ask them something. Natural discussion is harder to achieve in remote meetings with several attendees, as they cannot see your body language and who you are looking at. You must steer the conversation better.
Video
Encourage the prospect to turn on their camera, at least in the beginning of the meeting, especially if you haven’t met before. Try to use video as much as possible in every meeting. Trust is much harder to built over the phone so now that our remote conferencing technology is working, make the most of it.
Screensharing
Share your screen as much as you can, even when looking at the customers website, social media profiles etc. If you need to look at something that the customer or prospect should not see, I recommend using two screens.
Engage in the beginning
When the attendees introduce themselves, you can open a new tab in your browser (or preferably have their profiles already open in a few tabs in your browser when the meeting starts). As they share their work history and role, you can look at their LinkedIn profile. 9/10 times this builds lots of trust and the person shares much more than they otherwise would when they can tell that you are actually interested.
Material
Keep your slides minimalistic. Minimize text and numbers.
Use slides you can write on and add notes of the customers comments directly into the slides. Done right this makes the meeting 10x more engaging.
For example: when sharing the agenda that is on the material, you can make modifications when you walk through the agenda, to make sure you are fully aligned with the customer. Create clear talking points into the agenda by adding notes to the agenda slide in the beginning of the meeting.
Use simple framework on your slides, and use animations, so you can show one thing at a time. You cannot point or go up to the screen in remote meetings, so it becomes more important to focus on one thing at a time. Us humans are not great at listening and reading at the same time.
Being able write while the customer is watching puts great emphasis on modern sellers ability to write well and type fast! One sales leader was worried about his sellers making a bad impression if they have to write while the customer sees. Just as writing in general, good writing is about thinking clearly. If the seller is not thinking clearly, he/she cannot write clearly.
Send the slides after the meeting.
Virtual whiteboard
Some software like zoom for example, enables using a whiteboard. I suggest testing this out if you do whiteboarding in meetings or draw on flipcharts.
Attendees
Limit the amount of attendees. Sometimes customers see a meeting (as they should if you are an expert) as an educational opportunity, so they invite tons of participants. The threshold for inviting many participants to remote meetings is low. One risk of this is extra background noise and poor connections etc. The bigger problem is that it will be harder to build a personal connection with the most important stakeholders. They are less likely to open up about their personal objectives, problems and internal battles they may be experiencing, if there are many people in the meeting.
Recording
One option to typing notes on your key keyboard(can be loud and distracting) is to record the meeting with the permission of the customer. Otter.ai for example transcribes the conversation to text and zoom videoconferencing software allows for recording of meetings. You can either save the audio, or also the audio and screen recording.
Notifications
Keep desktop notifications off. You don’t want them popping up while you are sharing your screen. Once you’ve turned them off, keep them off forever. Notifications are terrible productivity killers for sales professionals, and anyone for that matter.
Clarity of communication
Compared to normal meetings, you will have to speak slower and clearer. Clear, well thought-out spoken words aligned with what you are showing the customer are crucial. Make sure you speak in sentences, exchanging thoughts with the customer. Try maintaining a rule, that you don’t speak for more than 10-15 seconds in a row at any time during the meeting.
Conclusion
When selling remotely, we must make sure salespeople are maximizing the ways they engage the customer and bring them into the conversation. Since customers cannot see easily what we are doing on the other side, and we cannot see what the customer is doing, it makes sense to maximize engagement. Screen sharing, video and using material that you can make notes on together with the customer, all increase engagement.
Let’s use these difficult times to raise our level of execution and come out of the crisis much stronger than ever before.