To run more effective sales calls, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your buyer. What experience do they want you to deliver during the meeting?
Regardless of your ideal customer profile, the person on the other end of the conference meeting wants to be listened to. They want to feel understood. Most importantly, they don’t want you to waste their time.
Sure, you might know the basics of selling. You might be an expert salesperson. But there’s always room to grow, and chances are you haven’t implemented all of these 5 ways to run effective sales calls.
Below the image, you can read how to wow your leads during sales calls:
1. Use a meeting software with shared whiteboards and doc annotation
At an in-person meeting, you probably talk with your hands to illustrate your points, don’t you? You make sweeping gestures and staccato hand motions to make certain statements stand out.
Well, talking with your hands doesn’t translate well to the online world. Even when your camera is on, the effect isn’t quite the same.
A far better way to illustrate your most important points is to use a shared whiteboard.
When the whiteboard is directly inside of the online conference room, you don’t have to worry about giving the lead access or confusing them with too many link destinations. You simply open up the whiteboard inside of the meeting room and draw or add text as needed.
Document annotation is another way to wow your leads. Upload files of your sales presentation to your meeting room.
Annotate files for emphasis as you talk, illustrate important statistics, or call out service features that can be changed or customized.
According to Salesforce, 50% of closed deals required 2 or more sales meetings, with 11% requiring 7 or more sales meetings.
Needless to say, storing previous notes, whiteboards, and documents is a huge help. Fortunately, Vectera saves everything in your meeting rooms for a later review, so you can always pick up exactly where you left off.
Vectera is an online meeting software with whiteboards and document annotation—no downloads required for you or your leads.
2. Load your meeting software with templated content
Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to find your notes and slides before every single sales call?
At Vectera, we recently released our meeting room templates. Essentially, what this means is that you can preload your meeting room with the content you need to make your sales call a success.
Here’s what you can put in your meeting room templates:
- Private notes - Remind yourself of phrases customers love, popular features, stories of customer results, questions to ask, pricing details, or anything else you need to have at hand.
- Presentation slides - You can preload your meeting room with your slide deck so that for each and every sales call, it’s loaded up and ready to go. (The added benefit here is that you never have to worry about sharing the wrong thing on your screen.)
- Background images - Not into full-blown presentations at your company? Maybe instead of running through several slides, you just want to have one important image in the background during the entire sales call. This could be a personality-filled picture of your team, a detailed view of your product, or a customer testimonial with stats about average customer results. To top it off, you can fully brand your Vectera meeting room with a custom logo and domain.
- Whiteboards with preloaded notes and annotations - Perhaps you like the fun and informal nature of shared whiteboards. You can create a whiteboard with written text that shows up at the start of every meeting, and then during the meeting you can draw or annotate around your words. This saves you time and hassle during the meeting, but still yields an interactive experience. (Do you want to autofill meeting rooms with content from your DMS? Request a demo to learn how.)
- Specific room settings - In addition to all of your sales content, you can also predetermine meeting room settings and sharing settings for your sales meetings.
After all, an effective sales call is a well-prepared sales call.
3. Begin with the lead’s motivation for seeking a solution
You should never allow yourself to get stuck in a rut when it comes to sales meetings. You shouldn’t deliver the exact same pitch to every lead all day long. Instead, you need to personalize your recommendations and your probing questions to their unique needs.
The best way to do this is to uncover why they decided to make time to speak with you.
After a quick introduction to set the purpose of the call, you should ask them what they’re looking for or what issues they’re experiencing. Make sure to do this before proceeding with your standard talking points.
There are several benefits to doing so:
- Understand the lead’s personality, tone of voice, pain points, and sensitivity so you can tailor not only what you’re saying but how you’re speaking. (Make sure to add what you already know about the lead to your private notes in Vectera before the conversation.)
- Set accurate expectations for how likely you are to convert the lead.
- Know what features of your product or service to highlight.
- Better understand the level of urgency so you can be prepared with the appropriate next steps to suggest at the end of the call.
4. Have an agenda for the meeting, not for the lead
Every great sales meeting needs to have an agenda. What do you usually cover? What do you need to ask? What does the lead need to know?
However, you shouldn’t have an agenda for the person you’re speaking to.
Your goal shouldn’t be to sell to them, but to help them. Especially if you’re in commission-based sales, this notion can be challenging to fully embody. You have bills to pay, and you want to close as many deals as possible. But when you treat sales as a service, your good deeds come back to you. People who aren’t ready to buy will remember how helpful you were and recommend you to others.
“Sales is not about selling anymore, but about building trust and educating.” - Siva Devaki, CEO of MassMailer
5. Be genuinely excited and upbeat
Your energy matters. A lot. There’s a fine line between upbeat and obnoxious, so make sure you never fake it.
Instead of being falsely “high vibe” during your sales calls, here’s what you should do instead:
- Take a deep breath before each call.
- Before each call, also visualize how awesome your product or service is and how much it can help your client.
- Don’t speak in a scripted way, and be sure to tailor the conversation to the lead’s needs, this way you don’t come across as bored or robotic.
- As you’re talking with the lead, visualize how excited and happy your lead will be when they are using your product or service (this will make you sound more energetic naturally, instead of like you’re faking it)
Remember, it’s not about pretending to be a happy cheerleader, it’s about being genuinely excited for the lead’s success and always bearing in mind how your solution can contribute to their success.
When you focus the sales call on what the prospective customer needs out of their time with you, your closing rate increases.
Vectera is the world’s best software for client meetings and sales calls. Get started for free.