Post-pandemic and things have essentially returned to normal, but one holdover from the days of lockdowns and working-from-home has been the reluctance of clients to take on face-to-face meetings with salespeople. With the rise of video conferencing technologies such as Zoom and Teams, along with the ease of email and telephone, the days of salespeople visiting customers seems to be an almost old-fashioned idea.
Unfortunately, while email is easy, and virtual meetings certainly have their place, salespeople who don’t push to meet clients in-person may fail to build key relationships, lose valuable insights, and perhaps even become a little bit lazy. There are several significant reasons for salespeople to step away from the comfort of virtual meetings and make contact with customers directly.
Building Relationships
People like to do business with people like them. For the longest time, one of the critical tools in the salesperson’s kit was the ability to connect with customers on a personal level. Finding common ground, demonstrating understanding, and even sharing experiences helped build client trust. While it’s not impossible to develop key relationships over a video call, the nature of such calls leans towards brevity.
The formal nature of such meetings skips past the pre-meeting chit-chat, the conversations over coffee, and the post-meeting walk to the elevator. People expect video calls to be concise and, consequently, purely a business talk or presentation with little leeway for those organic interactions that help foster a sense of personal connection. A sale boils down to hard numbers when everything is purely business, whereas the personal touch can overcome obstacles such as slight variances in fees.
Gather Insights
A considerable advantage to face-to-face meetings is the ability to gather insights into the customer. Those coffee-break chats and walks to the elevator often result in the salesperson being furnished with a bit of extra information that they might not have otherwise received. When people are at ease, they’re a little less guarded and more inclined to offer information that could help the salesperson spot further gaps in the client’s business.
Identifying gaps is crucial to developing a relationship beyond a mere sale or two. It offers opportunities to cross-sell, upsell, find further pain points, and provide even more solutions. Salespeople should aim to be more than just a point-of-contact on a single project, but a trusted partner who can add value above and beyond the initial sale.
Become a Contact Point
Trust isn’t built at a distance. Many people can’t even remember the salesperson’s name a few weeks after the sale is complete. As a result, when they need something else, they’re more inclined to shop around, which risks them taking their business to a competitor next time. However, when they’ve met you, like you, and they have your card, they now have a direct line back into your business, which essentially offers you the first chance to do business with them again.
Furthermore, by offering them a direct line into your business, you can start building more direct lines into theirs. By adopting a team-selling approach, you can create links between different departments and organisations which will give you a considerable advantage over competitors in the future, particularly when looking to identify potential key accounts.
Proactivity With a Purpose
Cold calling is a necessary evil in business. None of us is particularly fond of receiving cold calls, but we understand that sometimes we have to make them, and sometimes we have to receive them. We also understand that when we’re making them, the success rate is very low. For every hundred calls we make, we’re lucky to get five leads and even luckier if we can close two or three of them.
Part of the reason cold calls fail so often is that people simply don’t trust them. Consequently, if you reach out to a past client who only knows you from a fifteen-minute video call or a brief email exchange, you’ll struggle a lot more with the call than if you reach out to someone whose hand you’ve shaken and with whom you’ve shared a coffee or a joke.
You might not get the sale each and every time, but your calls are much less likely to be dismissed as just another cold call. They’re much more likely to be taken seriously, considered genuine, and even when unsuccessful, to give you a few extra crucial minutes that you likely wouldn’t have otherwise had.
While the days of travelling salespeople popping in for a cuppa and a chat might have passed, the importance of these direct interactions hasn’t changed. Salespeople need to meet people, they need to get facetime with key decision makers, they need to gain valuable insights into customers, and they need to position themselves as trusted advisors.
Salespeople who are content to sit behind a desk all day, waiting for customers to call them, or sending out a hundred unsolicited messages trying to arrange a call are, in the long term, going to be left behind by those salespeople who still understand that business is actually personal.
