178: Selling From Your Home Office

<p>Selling From Your Home Office</p> <p> </p> <p>Normally we lob up to meet the buyer in their office meeting room.  With the buyer and ourselves now working from home, we have to switch gears on how we interact.  Usually there are a number of people on the buying side for us to meet and there is no reason why we can’t meet them all on-line.  The technology today can handle multiple people in the same virtual meeting.  We should encourage everyone to attend because we want as many on the decision making side to hear our presentation as possible.</p> <p> </p> <p>It gets a bit tricky though, because other key decision makers are not online in the meeting and we are at the mercy of our champions, to be able to sell our message in the on-line environment.  That means we cannot rely on just the virtual meeting to do the selling for us and we need additional documents to be distributed to everyone involved.  It also means that the entire process slows down because the buyer team may not be confortable or adept at working on-line.</p> <p> </p> <p>Normally we don’t want the buyer looking at our materials while we are talking during the meeting.  We want them focused on us and what we are saying and this is the same situation.  Don’t use the technology to go into a slide show with your commentary, until you know what they want.  The temptation is to hammer the buyer with as much information as possible during the meeting.  It makes no sense when we are face to face, so the virtual environment doesn’t make a virtue of this approach either.  Ask good questions, wait for answers and don’t feel pressure in the on-line environment to have to keep doing all the talking.  Sometimes there is a delay in the audio and the silence can make us uncomfortable.  Ask your question and then relax and wait for them to answer.  They may be thinking what they want to say.  Don’t cut them off when they are talking or interrupt them on-line, as the technology doesn’t handle this well.  Actually we shouldn’t be doing it in face to face meetings