One vitally important aspect of virtual selling is the facilitating of 2-way communication.
In other words, you do not want to set up a video meeting with no agreement on how the meeting should proceed, and then jump right into the meeting with a sales pitch. They will not like it any more than you would if you were the prospect.
What you need to do is to work with your prospect to set up expectations before the video meeting or call. This is often done by suggesting a meeting agenda through email.
For example, once the prospect has agreed to a time and date for a video meeting, you could send an email such as this:
Dear Michelle,
Thank you for agreeing to meet with us on Tuesday at 11 AM! We are very much looking forward to it. In addition to myself, I will also have our technical specialist on the call to assist in addressing specific issues you may have and to detail how our product might solve them.
I would like to suggest a rough agenda for our meeting to go as follows:
- The technical specialist and I obtain an understanding of your business and business model.
- You walk us through the technical issues you are having with your current product.
- We demonstrate how our product will solve those issues for you.
We can certainly discuss further, but we would like to minimally take up these points. Does that sound good to you?
Let us know!
Sincerely,
Bert Fineman
Sales Representative
The prospect can then reach back to you, and the meeting expectations can be adjusted as needed prior to the meeting.
The reason such a move is important is that this new video selling environment is still new to everyone—hence it is a little uncomfortable for both you and the prospect.
Through an agreement, the expectations for the meeting can be set and agreed upon—and everyone going into the meeting can do so with a measure of confidence and calm.
Setting these expectations also means that you are encouraging 2-way communication throughout this phase of the sales process. In other words, the communication is not all or mostly all from you to the prospect, which in sales it all too often is—something that greatly hinders a receptive and happy prospect.
But setting expectations with total input from the prospect means that communication is going both ways. You then only need to make sure this free-flowing 2-way communication proceeds throughout the meeting as well.
And yet a third reason is that the beginning of the sales process is all about establishing trust. When you agree upon and then follow the agenda for the meeting, the prospect has begun to learn that they can trust you.
