BONUS Tutorial: Virtual & Digital selling: Mark McInnes

Bonus POW💥 Course Content. Virtual & Digital Selling Tutorial.
 
Let’s face it, virtual & digital Selling is here to stay. So why are salespeople so crap at it?
After sitting on 1000’s of ZOOM calls, webinars, demos and sales calls that have completely stunk, I’ve decided to share a short action plan to help sellers lift their game when it comes to digital & virtual selling.

We’ve all been in those situations when you expect your buyer to turn up and engage and then they turn up don’t have their video on and will barely acknowledge you.  You feel like you’re talking to yourself for the next 45mins?

What about when some extra people turn up to your demo that you weren’t expecting?

How can you make the most of your time and your sales efforts when selling online?

What can we do to try and claw back some of the advantages of rapport and relationship building whilst operating online?

Sellers, it’s time to lift your collective virtual sales game.
Start here.

Mark McInnes
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mcinnes/

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Transcript

Mark McInnes: 0:00

Welcome to the BOSS podcast. I'm Mark McInnes. In this show ,together, we unlock tactics. Sellers can use to help them to land conversations with their ideal buyers or to just be better at selling regardless of the platforms they choose to use. Tonight, I'm hearing something to help all salespeople be better at virtual or digital selling. I've been on thousands of zoom meetings and presentations. And I can tell you, the average seller is doing a pretty awful job at running a decent virtual sales meeting, whether that be via zoom teams or Google meet. And when I say sales meeting, I mean a demo or a discovery call or even a follow-up conversation. The session that I'm sharing with you tonight is part of the bonus pack that I share with people that come to my power training programs that I run my prospecting outbound at workshop, these workshops are designed to help solve people, build out their own individual framework to having more and better sales conversations with their ideal buyers This is a sneak peek into just one of those powerful. If you want more information about a panel courses, simply go to my website, which is mark mc.co forward slash pow for more details. This particular session is also available on my YouTube channel. If you'd like to grab the visual version, would, you can find by just going to YouTube and searching for marketing and a sales training. This clip is called pal virtual selling. I'll also post this up on my LinkedIn profile, my featured section. So you can grab it there as well. In this 20 minute session tonight, we'll cover off some simple steps that you can take to be better at selling virtually whether that means you're flexible working from home full-time or work from home during COVID type lockdowns, or if you're running a virtual meeting from a hotel room, regardless of what it is, I'm confident that you'll get better results and more sales. If you follow these simple steps in your digital sales situations. Thanks for listening. Selling via zoom or teams is now something we will need to do for a long time beyond the timeframe of COVID lockdowns. And when they disappear off our radar forever buyers have made it clear. They have a desire for buying in this digital and virtual format. And so. Selling this way will continue in at least some format, primarily as it has several benefits for the buyers, they find it easier and more convenient. It's harder for salespeople to build rapport and then sell off the back of relationships. And it makes it easier for buyers to ghost in and out of communication as they wanted for buyers, virtual and digital selling or virtual and digital bonds. It's perceived as a safer way to engage both sales. Yeah. People and their organizations was buyers who sectors or industries are full of amiable, analytical buyers, such as Hightower or accounting professionals. This is a great way for them to buy. It provides a barrier of safety between them and their vendor sales people. This level of safety is what's driving the desire to continue to buy vote by virtual and digital formats. Well into the future in order to try and rebalance our selling environment, we need to be very good and rehearsed at this new digital or virtual meeting. I've created this session as an overview of the main mistakes I see time. And again, that sellers make when turning up on video sales calls, I see salespeople messing up their video presentations all the time. The good news is that that solution is not hard to get, right. It doesn't matter if it's first meetings presentations pick up. Prospecting messages, discovery calls or software demonstrations, virtual or digital will be part of selling from here on, in, in order to be good at sales today and into the future. When going needed to be good at virtual selling, there's so much to cover here. I could not possibly do it all in one take. So if you really want to lift your game in digital selling, then grab a copy of Jeb Blount, virtual selling as a strong guide to all things virtual. I completely recommend it. However, it's a nine hour read. So let me provide some shortcuts to what I think are the key areas we need to get. In this session, we'll cover the main areas. I see sales people screw up so you can fix them straightaway or better yet. Avoid them all together. There were three obvious parts to this discussion. One how you manage your own screen presence to the technology. Three is how you sell on digital. So let's jump into the first place. Your onscreen presence. Firstly, let's acknowledge that you're giving up lots of ground by not being able to see people in face-to-face situations. There's less body language available for it to help us interpret what it is that we're hearing. There's no handshake, no fist bump, no physical contact, but there's a lot of positives also about using video. One of the things that you need to be aware of is a thing called mirror neurons. Do you know what mirror neurons are? This is the reflex response that you have when you're walking down the street and someone coming in the opposite direction, smalls at you, you can't help, but want to smile back. It's a reflexive action mirror, neurons help people feel more connected to you. So using video, even in a prospecting video is much better than a textbook. Only piece of outreach because you'll trigger these mirror neurons. It turns out we get the same effect, whether the other person is live or on a screen, such as a TV, a monitor, or a video call. So wherever we can, let's maximize the power of video allies face and voice, everything in our ability to communicate. If we get video, right, we'll be giving up a lot less ground to our bot. As compared to text-based communications. Screen placement, make sure you're in the center. Plenty of face micro. They can actually see your facial movements. Rapport is all about wanting people to like you or at least to prefer. In order to like you, they need to first see you, Mike showing your video presence is not too dark. So we can't see that. You're making sure that your video presence has not too dark. So we can't see your face. Mike, Troy, your video presence is not so dark that they can't see your face. What your background, light levels. If your background is too bright, it overpowers the near lesion and can make it harder to see your face and your facial movements and features. Make sure your camera is not too low so that your buyers are looking up your nose or too high. And they're looking down your forehead. What from home situations makes both of these a common mistake for salespeople. As solves paper work from their kitchen table or from their bedroom, Mike, the effort to fix these, even if it's simply by getting us something simple as a stack of books and bringing your laptop camera up to your eye height. Remember the camera is your buyer's eyes. Eye contact is critical in all forms of communication, whether it be face-to-face or virtual, but here's the paradox of eye contact on video whilst you want to be making eye contact. So you look at where their face is on your screen, but by doing that, you're not looking at your camera. You're looking at your screen, what the others on the call. So, yeah, is that you're not making eye contact or you're trying to make eye contact, looking at your camera is providing eye contact. But when you do that, you can't see their face. It's a paradox. It's certainly a calendar, but we still need to gain and build trust. And our face and eye contact plays a big part here in order to do that. Look at the camera, not at the picture of the advice research says, we spend somewhere between 30 and 77% of the time on video calls, looking at our own image on the screen. Now I don't need any research to validate that. I know it's true. Just from my own experience. Running zoom meetings, eight takes practice. It's hard not to look at yourself. Yeah. In order to provide the best possible vocal impact. I strongly recommend you consider standing up to present or record. We all know that your posture changes the way that you speak and because how you say something is at least as important as what you say, Michael, you're placing yourself in a good position to sound as good as you can standing up makes you sound the best. In my opinion. Sitting on an office chair or worse. Your dining room table is a sure way to have poor posture. And as a result of that poor posture, poor tonality, poor pace and poor vocal delivery. If you don't believe me, record your video or voice from two or three different sitting positions and play it back for evaluation, you'll be surprised at what you can do. Let's come through to something about dress code. And I think the standard dress code remains for sales and that is dressing at least one dress standard higher than your bias. So you don't want to dress so well as to make them uncomfortable, but not so low that you lose your credibility on the point of dressing. I'm all for being authentic and bringing your real you to the workplace or to the work from home workplace, if that's the case. But when authenticity becomes a catchphrase for laziness or can be perceived as laziness, you've got a real challenge. If you look messy and the shovel people are entitled to think you're, you will approach your work in the same fashion when it comes to dressing and looking the part for a video call or for digital seller. I like to use a key point of dressing and looking like your LinkedIn profile picture, why we know lots of people will visit your LinkedIn profile or Google you, which will take them to back to your LinkedIn profile as part of their buying process. And they'll do this prior to coming into a call with you. What they see there on LinkedIn is setting the parameters around their initial expectations. So if you're in a suit or a shirt and tie on LinkedIn, and then you turn up to a zoom meeting in a Tuesday, What does that say to the buyer? It shows a lack of consistency and a crew create what I call an automatic trust gap between what you've shown them online and what happens in real life. This will lead your buyers to ask what else isn't true. You're creating an unnecessary trust gap. This is not ideal, and importantly can be easily avoided. So dress exactly the same on your calls as your LinkedIn picture. Kind one to match the other. I don't care which one you change. Makeup men. If your face shows up with all greedy hotspots or reg blockers, consider using some concealer or a light pressure powder to even out any shiny noses or ruddy foreheads. Look, if it's good enough for Tom cruise and Russell Crowe, you're not beyond a little bit of help yourself. Technology being an expert and being able to manage the chosen technology is critical. Okay. But first up, if seeing someone face and hearing someone's voice is going to Mike for a deeper connection for both the buyer and the seller, what do you think we need to do as far as technology's concerned? Where do we need to focus? We need to make sure our audio and lighting are sorted out after all, we need to be both seen and heard on most video calls that I'm on. We have at least one person talking whilst they're on mute. And it certainly became a catch cry that I hate. You're on mute. It doesn't need to be this way. If you're trying to position yourself as an expert in your field or somebody who operates their businesses that are high. Being unable to operate zoom, Google meets or Microsoft teams at an advanced level is simply like, think yourself open to doubt about your ability to operate in a fast moving business environment. Believe me, your clients and prospects are thinking you freak out managed basic zoom function. How can I trust that to provide me with something as complicated as my financial advice? If you think they're going to give you a free pass, you're sadly mistaken. What about audio microphone, get a microphone and news that even if it's just the old apple style cord plug and play version, putting your ears things this way, you'll not miss anything that your buyers say, plus it makes it easier for them to hear you talking directly into your Mac. Laptop. Microphone is for amateurs. It's an echo char. The small price you might pay for having the look of a headset on a call is more than made up for actually being able to hear clearly and be heard other options that work well for microphones are desktop Mike's preferably with a boom stand or wireless Mar headphones or buds such as apple. My favorite is a simple quarter lapel microphone from $35 from microphone. You just plug that straight into the more into the mic port on my Mac and Mac book and connect it to my shirt collar. I then use my AirPods as the vehicle, as my speakers. Jumping across to lighting lights that are variable in color, temperature and intensity of very cheap. And he'll be in everyone's toolkit. In fact, I'd argue you need two lights to help balance out the shadows on your face. There are viable as low as 10 bucks on Amazon light temperature refers to the tone of the white light or the color of the wireline. Some lights are a blue, white, such as the lights that you might find in your supermarket or your seven 11. Whereas others are more yellow, white by an LAA system that allows you to adjust the temperature between the blue and the yellow, white to make sure you look your best. If you get one that's too blue and might make you look pasty, two yellow makes you look tired onto backgrounds. There are heaps of options here. The key point is your video background. You don't want your chosen video background to be distracting or be more interesting than you. One of my clients recently would come to a weekly sales training session sitting in front of a recent washing, hanging out in her apartment. She was a great seller, but it was not a great look lightly. Nearly every virtual video platform has a background blur function. This is the best way out of a tough situation. If you can't manage your environment. Ideally, you want to have a nice plain background. So the focus is all on you. If you're using a plain real background, it says I've got nothing to hide. This type of plain background is my preferred solution. If you have to use a virtual background because of the environment, then you're in, then that's fine. Find a cheap and easy green screen. Even if it's one that simply pops over the back of UTA. These are pretty easy to find on Amazon for about $45. And it makes you a background look like a great fit and lifts. The professionalism of your total presentation is nothing less than somebody with a virtual background. We're moving their head from side to side and half their face disappears. Let's face facts. Our virtual background without a green screen looks cheap and is poorly executed. A green screen makes a massive difference. If you want, you can even get them printed double-sided to allow you to have a real brand and backdrop, if you need it, I've had one for years and I completely write it. I'll give you a quick overview of all my tech setup at the end of this session. Now under the third piece, how do you actually run a great virtual meeting? How you sell virtual? There've been lots of conversations about how people buy both you and the way that you sell over the products and services that you sell. And of course this remains true for virtual selling as well. It also means that the reverse is true. If you do a terrible job of selling by virtual people, aren't going to buy you. So, how do we sell? Well in the virtual world, here are the tips I've picked up training people all over the world, as well as trading, selling, virtually myself. Good sales meetings are planned. They certainly don't happen by luck. Start planning early on. Set the tone with an agenda. I know you've been told previously to always send an agenda in your meetings or your calendar invites. So this is just an extension of that. When you're booking a video call with tools like zoom, don't use all the standard automated automatic invite. Customize it, remove the phone, dial in information, dial in information. If you want people to be present and interactive in your call only supplied the web. Put the Cal invite, putting the Cal invite the agenda for the meeting, remove all the details that you don't need and place in the details that you do need. This provides a really easy way to build context at the start of the meeting by simply walking through the agenda and asking if that's okay of there's something else that I'd like to cover or discuss in the meeting invitation. Explain that you'll have your video on ask them to do so too. There's no guarantee that they will turn up and have the video on, but by clearly stating in your request that we much more likely to comply. Running a meeting where you can't see the other person increases the difficulty of the meeting. You can't tell if they're paying attention, taking notes or doing something else. I think we've all had one of those meetings and they're really tough. Do whatever you can decide step that when you're asking somebody to turn it off. In a video call and have their video on, you're probably going to need to provide a simple reason. I found using a persuasion strategy such as social proof often works well here. It allows you to ask whilst positioning as being in their best interests, something like the following is how you could do that. Mary, in previous decades, are found. We can cover a lot more ground and waste less of your time. If we all have our cameras on other clients have told me, it makes for a much better meeting from their side as well. I'll certainly have more. Give that a trial. One of the other things I like to do early on is engage everyone in the meeting. There's a couple of reasons that I like to do this. Firstly, you want to get any potential tech challenges out of the way, very early, preferably in the first 60 to 90 seconds of your learning, this allows you to. Your, you know, that classic you're on mute pace out of the way early in the meeting while people are still settling in and prepared to accept those types of challenges, get people to test their microphone simply by saying, hello, make sure they can quickly and easily mute on and off. The second reason I like to do this is it sets the tone for the expectation that they'll need to interact with you. That it's not going to be a one-way speaker. By welcoming everyone as they come into the room and then ask them a simple question. You'll be able to tell very early on whether they intend to interact or sit on the sidelines and also allows you to see and hear who might have tech troubles. Often I say to people, often I hear people say, oh, look, I'm just from marketing. We're going to sit here, sit here and be a fly on the wall. Don't expect too much for me. You can then decide to either let them sit on the sidelines or tell them right there. And then that you'll keep them engaged in the conversation. And you'd love to have them interact. That's up to you, but the point is you're setting the time. They're not have questions ready for everybody. One of the advantages of virtual meetings is you can often see who's been added to the meeting in advance. This allows you to do some pre-call research, so you can have some questions ready to engage them. That research could be as simple as their employment background and their length of tenure, their current role. This is all possible via simple LinkedIn research, or perhaps is possible from reading something, you know, going to Google and finding their blog or something else. I was once told the person who is the quietest in the meaning is probably the biggest naysayer to wherever it is, whatever it is that you're selling. I've always tried to make sure I ask good questions from those who choose to be quiet in order to do that. You'll need to prepare well in advance, timings and stops. We need to understand that a virtual presentation is much less dynamic than real life. So start. Regularly and make sure you still have the audience engaged. I'd say every five to 10 minutes, don't do an endless 20 minute dialogue. It's easy to get bored or distracted. If you're an attendee work hard on making the learning environment as interactive as possible. Smaller pieces are key for attention on virtual time. Allocation for meetings has been shrunk since we moved to VCs. You will have noticed that the standard one hour face to face meeting has now become a 45 minute or even a 35, 30 minute VC call. This is great. We might be spending less time in meetings, but we still want to make sure that we're getting and setting good outcomes. Whereas in face-to-face meetings, you might find that you spend 10 to 15 minutes on rapport conversations and small talk with things like, would you like me to get you a card? This doesn't exist anywhere near the same on the say, expect to have two to three minutes of small talk and then have a nice segue straight into business and your pre-call research figure out in advance what your small talk is likely to. One of my favorite strategies in running great meetings is when you're asking people to answer or you want their input calling out their name at the start of the sentence, and then supplying what I call a deliberate filler to give them time to respond and then, and also to manage their technology so that they can turn, they can come off mute, mute. We need this to be con we need to be conscious that our response will not be swift as it would be in a face-to-face setting. So instead of saying something. So what's your take on that? Rebecca? Let's try something like this. Rebecca, I'm curious to know what you think of this study, especially as you've been in this situation before, is this typical? What sort of insights can you share here? Based on our experience? Padding out the back half of that question, even just for a few seconds, like this will create a much more professionally run experience for all. And it's important to remember that if our buyers feel uncomfortable, if it feels like we're making them feel awkward or putting them under pressure in the morning, they lock on to feel awkward to Watts and our situation, knowing how to handle the expected delay in response, due to the tech technical environment that we're operating in can make a significant difference, not only to the meeting, but to the way you're perceived as a sales process. Because digital is not the same as face-to-face you do risk to some of your main points being missed in order to minimize that, I try to do one thing in relation to meeting structure and that's the classic. Tell them what I'm going to tell them in this meeting at the start and then tell them what I said. I would tell them. And then at the end of the meeting or summarize that, I tell them what I've told. Try that out and see how it goes. Look, I'm sure you're doing some of these already, but if you put all of this together, every single time you'll be operating in the virtual and digital selling world at a much higher capacity than 90% of the salespeople. I see today spending a couple of dollars on your technology, spending some time to make sure you get all of the functionality right. Being consistently good is always going to be better than operating on thing occasionally. Great. Thanks for listening.