How Virtual Sellers Can Capture and Keep Buyers’ Attention

For many, the transition to virtual sales went something like this: One minute you were a basketball superstar with pretty good plays and a good field goal percentage. Then you were thrown right into a baseball game, handed a glove, and told to win. In a very different field. Requires a very different skill set.

Sounds familiar?

Where previously you may have been successful in person, shoppers at the moment are harder to attach with, more easily distracted, and more more likely to multitask in a virtual environment.

Virtual sale test found that 91% of outlets said that “getting a buyer’s attention and virtually keeping them engaged” is difficult. Here are 4 suggestions to maintain shoppers engaged during virtual sales meetings:

Related: 4 essential imperatives for virtual sales success

1. Use tools

Before 2020, you could be in a conference room with 5-10 people. Several represent your sales team, including material, technical and industry experts. The rest is with the prospect, including yours inner master and decision makers.

With everyone within the room together, you’ll be able to hop on the board at any time, become involved, collaborate, bring ideas to the team, and maintain a reasonably agile response to questions.

During virtual meetings, we’re limited to a really small box – and in lots of cases, shoppers deal with that small box for a lot of the day. It can be much easier to opt out of virtual meetings and even leave early.

You should be far more considerate about the way you show up, attract attention, and generate engagement during virtual meetings.

Planning is the important thing here. Arm yourself with the tools you might want to organize collaborative and interactive meetings. You can:

• Enable video: The use of video in virtual meetings helps to ascertain personal contact, deepen relationships and construct trust.

• Share something on screen: From slides to statistics to videos, there are several resources you need to use to exhibit your arguments.

• Collaborate with virtual boards: Use virtual whiteboards to take notes, collaborate, exhibit ideas, and more.

• Use digital sticky notes: Sticky Notes might be used to list agenda items, as a way of remembering to return to questions/topics, or to something else entirely.

• Run polls and polls: Especially if you’ve got several buyers in a virtual meeting, anonymous polls and polls are a fantastic solution to get an idea of ​​what is going on on in your organization.

To go: Practice and plan to make use of the available tools. Doing this frequently increases the danger of technical issues, awkward silences, and poor buyer experiences.

2. Use visuals

The attention span of adults is shrinking. Limit videos to lower than 30 seconds. You have to grab attention in the primary eight seconds of your email.

Most of us have heard these ideas in some form over the previous couple of years. The truth is that individuals listen to 1) things they care about and a couple of) visually stimulating things. Think motion movies, browsing social media, the opening ceremony of the Olympics, etc.

Your goal is to supply this in virtual sales meetings. We will cover the primary point within the second half of this text. For now, let’s deal with the visuals. During virtual sales meetings, the best solution to use visuals is for example the problems you’re talking about. But it is not limited to design knowledge. To consider:

• Movement: Incorporate motion into each yourself and your content (e.g. PowerPoint animation or on-screen annotation).

• Face: Watch facial expressions and remember to smile.

• Body: Use body language to signal interest (sitting and leaning forward) and use your hands to talk naturally.

• Space: Utilize the available space each within the video and on the screen.

• Timing: Moving across the screen rather a lot causes dopamine spikes and keeps people engaged.

Most importantly, don’t make it too complicated.

To go: Simplify every thing by removing text and increasing the variety of visuals and the frequency with which visuals move across the screen to maintain shoppers interested.

Related: 7 Ways to Avoid the #1 Mistake in Virtual Sales Meetings

3. Use templates

When selling in person, you often sit in a controlled environment along with your buyer. You do not have to fret about your web connection, picture and sound quality, or background clutter. You can have a ready list of questions you would like to address in your head.

But when there are such a lot of things to deal with in a virtual meeting, it is best to maintain the points of debate, questions, slides to present, etc. in a ready-made template.

For example, RAIN Group’s buyer shift plan might be easily viewed on screen and filled in live as you discuss each area with the customer.

Even in the event you use a unique template, the goal is to learn every thing you might want to create a differentiated solution. Even higher in the event you can benefit from a platform that enables the customer so as to add their ideas on to the template. For example, you’ll be able to share an inventory of common needs and ask buyers to position checks next to their needs.

After the meeting, you’ll be able to organize any shared documents and send them to the customer. They can then easily share with their team or generate additional questions for the following conversation.

To go: Use the template to make sure you capture all of the obligatory information, collaborating where possible.

4. Enjoy collaboration

As mentioned earlier, people listen to the things they care about. And that is where cooperation is available in. Seven out of ten buyers are open to collaborating, but only 34% of buyers say sellers are effective at doing so.

When sellers don’t cooperate, they reduce their options:

• Build relationships and relationships

• Discover and solve needs

• Inspire shoppers with recent ideas

• Change the perception of buyers

• Reach and maintain an engagement threshold

• Win more deals

As suggested within the previous section, one solution to collaborate, attract attention, and stay engaged is to make use of templates while needs discovery.

Think about it: in person, you’d talk by making eye contact and signaling visually and verbally (nodding, making acknowledgment sounds, etc.), but now you are confined to your little black box, listening to what the customer is saying and meticulously jotting down within the notebook in front of you – while the customer looks at the highest of your head. They would personally know you were taking notes. But during a virtual meeting, they don’t know what you are doing.

Related: How to Build Online Customer Relationships

Take advantage of this chance to collaborate. Open a template, Word document, text pad, or virtual whiteboard and write on the screen in real time in order that shoppers:

• Check that what they share is accurately recorded

• Stay engaged by reading the screen and ensuring the way in which you describe what they are saying reflects what they mean and the way they feel about it

• Collaborate as you’ll be able to go backwards and forwards answering deeper questions and revealing recent information

To go: Keep the customer experience in mind and look for methods to collaborate in any respect stages of the buying process.

Again, engaging buyers in virtual sales meetings isn’t any easy task. However, with the above 4 suggestions, you’ll be able to successfully attract and keep their attention. For your next virtual meeting, use tools, visuals, templates, and collaboration to extend your probabilities of success.