Increase sales with Sales 2.0 Strategies

Increasing Sales with Sales 2.0 Strategies - Web Conferencing

What is Sales 2.0

We’ve all heard of Web 2.0 – the phenomena that’s brought us the next generation use of the web with user interaction – Facebook, Youtube, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts…the list goes on to show how this has affected all our lives.

Now comes Sales 2.0 – an equal revolution for sales professionals which ensures they act with speed, agility and prowess. Take advantage of all the new technologies and adopt new ideas to increase sales revenue.

The world wide economic downturn has meant that salespeople are busier than ever, dealing with larger territories and more accounts working to tighter budgets. They can and are using Web Conferencing to weather the storm.

A survey of business to business sales professionals (Selling Power 2009) showed that 79% of respondents felt that the use of Web Conferencing would increase this year and they were intending to use it. This is not a passing fad – it is something that will increasingly dominate our sales and other communications going forward.

Web Conferencing Benefits

Web Conferencing or webinars have enormous time and cost saving benefits compared to face to face meetings. That’s a little bit obvious – rather than a group of people physically travelling to a venue and meeting in a dedicated room, they log onto their computers or laptops and attend the same meeting in the comfort of their office, home, car or coffee shop. Travel and opportunity cost savings are huge.

Gone are the days when companies set up whole rooms with enormous TVs and dedicated conferencing lines costing thousands of pounds. It’s the web that’s the backbone now.

At present the technology is not quite the same as meeting for real. But that may change in the future who knows. No, totally replacing face to face meetings is not plausible at this stage – I don’t think computers will fully replace the real benefit of actually meeting face to face, but this option is expensive and time consuming.
However, there are other benefits over the opportunity cost and physical cost saving of using web conferencing. Web conferencing in B2B sales can:

Help you attract more prospects via webinars that’ll mean more opportunities to sell to
Will decrease the length of the sales cycle, which in some industries can be tiresomely long
Bring people together quicker because you don’t need to juggle lots of people’s diaries and travel plans
Get decisions quicker as key decision makers can join the conference for say, 10 minutes, whereas normally they might not be available
Review documents so proposals don’t linger in email inboxes for ages
Give your sales teams more sales training

So let’s examine how web conferencing can assist the sales cycle and then we’ll take a look at how sales managers can use it to support the sales drive. We’ll have a look at a case study showing how it can be used and finally I’ll take a look at some of the technology you can use immediately to get the ball rolling with your sales teams and you’ll be surprised at the low cost.

Web Conferencing and the Sales Process

Prospecting

A web conference can replace a physical seminar to attract new prospects to your company. These have always been very successful at putting people into your sales funnel to qualify and move through the sales process.

Run your webinar in a similar manner. Recent research shows that 50% of people who use the web also do some form of social networking so people are used to the process of relating to others on the internet.

Bring in special guests, provide great content which will help your prospects solve their problems, prepare and focus on good speaking. Don’t bang on with commercials, but make it obvious that you are providing the webinar and the benefits you bring.
Provide freebies to those attending such as a White Paper to encourage sign up, and remind them a few times before the webinar begins. Free seminars have a fall off ratio but free webinars have a greater fall off, so be prepared to remind people and entice them to attend.

Keep them to 45 minutes to an hour – no longer as people’s attention span is less on the web.

Develop the Opportunity

Web conferencing can assist you in developing the opportunities with prospects bringing all interested parties together on one webinar. You can bring in your experts to provide additional information as normally these people would struggle to get to a physical meeting until the sales process had moved on to a certain sale. You can develop questions to elicit problems, pains and concerns, show videos, PowerPoint slides PDF documents to illustrate your ability to solve their problems.

Develop Proposals Quicker

Once we reach proposal stage, you can bring together all the internal resources you have in your company to help develop your proposal over a web conference. For someone to take 10 minutes out of their diary to join you on a conference is much less of a burden than an hour even if they are in the same building as you.

You can go over documents, develop ideas and strategies and create the document online if you wish. Collaboration is the key.

Presenting Solutions

Web conferencing is ideal for presenting your solutions and gives you the opportunity of delivering the proposal and going over it highlighting particular benefits. The traditional beauty parade can be dealt with online and some clients may expect you to present this way so they can get through 2 or 3 proposals in a morning rather than all day.

Conferencing allows presentation of documents, videos, PowerPoint as well as interactive white boards to act as a flipchart

It allows you to discuss and overcome any issues. All decision makers can join the call so you can get to a close quicker.

Other Uses for Sales Managers

Sales Meetings and Training

Use web conferencing to run more regular and sharper sales meetings. These meetings don’t have to run longer than 20 minutes, in fact the shorter the better. Use the principle of interactivity to involve the whole team through Q&As, chats, white boards to brainstorm etc.

Whenever new products are launched run a webinar to highlight the benefits. Invite an internal expert online to give an alternative viewpoint and top sales people who can share their best practise in using the new product.

Run regular sales training online. Short bursts are better than long drawn out workshops, share best practise amongst top performers, invite ideas, and bring in guest trainers to deliver sales training.

Record and make the MP4 file available to download for those who missed it.
Space out the training and roll it out over a long period so that continual learning takes place

Sales Coaching

Kerbside coaching or live call coaching can be extremely beneficial to the salesperson, but this practise makes sales managers haemorrhage time. However when the salesperson is running a web conference during the sales process, the sales manager can log on and listen and provide useful coaching after the event. The sales manager can even provide additional input when necessary and the client feels that they are getting all the resources of your company helping them solve their problems.

Naturally a sales manager can be more involved in accounts where their experience is needed and this can happen easily via web conferencing.

Motivating Your Sales Team

Explaining the reward systems can occur with the whole team rather than individual telephone calls. Recognition can be more powerful when their peers are on the webinar and can also hear. Questions about the reward system can be fielded so everyone is confident what is expected of them and the team.

Sale Support Services

As we all know the sale doesn’t stop when the contract is signed. Sales support are just as vital to our success as the salespeople. Sales support functions can run webinars with clients to help them apply the solution, discuss any technical issues, iron out problems. The facility to share desktops and documents makes this medium ideal for a sales support function.

Web Conferencing Case Study

Brian Jones is an account manager for Exxon Assurance, an insurance product provider that supplies protection products to intermediaries in the mortgage and financial services market.

Brian is one of 8 team members covering the south of the UK stretching from Maidstone, Kent to Cornwall. Brian’s particular area covers 3 counties and he spends much of his time travelling to meet face to face with his brokers.

Brian’s sales manager, Kerry Johnston, is extremely keen to see revenue increases this year and a more productive use of time and welcomes in Web Conferencing as a way to do this. Kerry signs up for an annual license for web conferencing using Webmeet.com. He opts for one which requires nothing more than broadband access and a web browser; in other words, anyone can join meetings when one has been set up with no need to download software.

The cost is about £100 a month.

Brian’s clients are large brokerages who fully utilise technology to support their own clients so accepting webinars is not going to be an issue. And Brian is also well into new fangled technical stuff.

The first step that Kerry carries out is to get his team fully trained on the use of web conferencing so he invites the provider – Webmeet.com – to run an online training session with all his team present for 25 minutes. Afterwards his team are energised and excited about its use and benefits to help them achieve their targets this year.
Kerry then holds a team meeting where they brainstorm ideas on how it can be utilised. Kerry involves everyone on the meeting and an interactive white board is used to add ideas during the brainstorm. The list includes:

More sales training online
Run a seminar for brokers using the firm’s internal protection experts to discuss trusts. Aim to get 250 attendees on line
Canvass their accounts to see which brokers are “up for” web conferencing.
Arrange meetings with accounts to discuss the benefits of web conferencing helping the broker in their own business. Outline how the web conference works and the time saving benefits to both parties
Conduct solution meetings online with key accounts with Kerry and other consultants who can assist. Aim to have all business proposals and ideas outlined using web conferencing so immediate feedback can be sought and quicker to closure and commitment.
Internally to have all sales meetings conducted online going forward except one face to face a quarter. All new initiatives and products to be presented online using internal experts.
No one webinar to last longer than 30 minutes.

Brian takes to the idea very quickly and enthusiastically. Although he is aware that some of his accounts are rather traditional in their approach and will still prefer face to face meetings. Brian is also well versed in a consultative approach to selling and focuses heavily on solving the accounts problems and pains by providing solutions and expertise.

Brian decides to target 4 of his big accounts to persuade them to use web conferencing and he knows the people in the accounts to approach. His angle is to explore how they currently communicate with their clients. The broker’s business is long term and client stay with them for many years and need ongoing support and advice.
He hope to elicit a similar response to their own i.e. shortage of time, need greater productivity etc so he can introduce to them the idea of web conferencing. To help the broker become used to it, Brian will offer to communicate to them via webinars to give them a feel.

3 of his accounts are very bullish about the whole idea and since Brian’s company have the webinar account set up, their broker only need to log onto any PC and enter the conference. The brokers find it easy for different people to enter the conversation without leaving their desks, sharing slides and PDF documents, asking questions, listening to answers. They appreciate how internal people from Exxon Insurance can be brought into the conversation to add more value.

Brian finds he can contact these 3 accounts more regularly and provide a better service using web conferencing.

He is also pleased that he doesn’t have to physically attend sales meetings which used to take a whole day travelling to and fro. He loves the idea of regular sales training and sharing of best practise sales ideas with his colleagues.

But the best news is how his sales support teams have taken to web conferencing using the medium to keep in touch with his accounts on matters that used to involve him. Now client cases can be discussed using webinars which allows online display of word files and emails and this allows instant decisions to be made about underwriting and other aspects that used to take ages.

Thank goodness for web conferencing, breathes Brian.

All in all Kerry is well pleased that he adopted Web Conferencing to assist his sales team increase their sales revenues.

How can you Web Conference?

There are dozens of solutions available to you as a user of web conferences. You can use free services such as:

Or pay a few pounds for services such as:

However if you want a more comprehensive approach with online support always available especially if you’re going to run large webinars for prospects, you need a paid model where you can pay a monthly fee to run a set number of conferences regularly. Adobe, Citrix are two you could look into.

For an overview, Youtube videos demonstrating a number of suppliers and more up to date information log onto www.webconferencingdatabase.com

Paul is an international sales speaker, sales trainer, author and coach based in the UK.

He specialises in rapport selling and rapport coaching and can ignite his audiences large or small.

Sign up to my weekly eZine of sales and coaching tips and get a free report on getting the best out of 2009 plus a free hypnotic relaxation MP3 to download. www.archertraining.co.uk

01452 730276

paul@paularcher.com

Blog – www.paularcher.com

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