In the course of our research on sales effectiveness, we regularly survey customers to learn what they think of their sales experiences. One of the metrics we track is the primary method of communication: are customers spending more time in-person with your reps or does the lion’s share of their communication happen virtually— over phone, via email, or other social media?
In general, sales forces are still overwhelmingly focused on in-person interaction, so they are often surprised to learn just how much of their sales communication actually occurs virtually. In fact, we’ve found that when it comes to new sales discussions, there’s a 50-50 split between in-person and virtual communications. What’s more, when the relationship has developed and it’s become more about staying in touch and keeping things on track, that ratio shifts even further, with only about 25 percent of interactions occurring in-person.
So, whether they know it or not, it’s clear that most B2B companies already have something of a virtual sales force. Our findings suggest that companies are probably not assigning sufficient importance to other forms of communication that, while less information-rich, are becoming increasingly prevalent.
This is not to suggest that in-person communication doesn’t have an important place in Sales. It’s fairly obvious to most sales leaders that it should be the preferred communication method for the start of a relationship. Negotiations in particular should take place in person as the high level of feedback will provide invaluable cues as to whether or not a customer actually wants to do business. More importantly, if a deal appears to be going nowhere, observing a customer’s physical reactions might be the only way you learn if you are getting any closer to overcoming their objections or concerns.
Communicating via telephone provides less rich information than direct person-to-person contact, but it does convey tone. This makes the telephone great for gathering information and for low-key, two-way interactions.
While not usually advisable, the phone can, on occasion, be valuable for negotiations. When, for instance, you have very little you want to negotiate with – essentially you have a “take it or leave it” proposition – the linearity of the medium might be to your advantage. In any event, I think that all sales reps should benefit from listening to their own calls to make sure that they clearly guiding the conversation and conveying proper tone.
In Sales, email is a purely cerebral medium. There are emoticons but those are crude substitutes for tone. Email is thus best suited to transmitting information and should not be used to convey anything controversial, if only because it is so easily circulated free of context.
Oftentimes, however, sales reps will have no choice and will need to explicitly include vital contextual information and make it an integral part of the email. These are sentences along the lines of “…I might not have the entire context so take this with a grain of salt…”. The goal here is always to get the customer to slow down in order to absorb the information in the context provided, thereby (hopefully) putting them into the right frame of mind.
For many, this longer-form writing—including apologies and expressions of goodwill—seems counter-intuitive and even unprofessionally verbose, but it is vital for email correspondence. In other words, for a sales rep, it is much better to be thought a bit too detailed than a bit too rude.
Video conferencing—including new “virtually there” technologies like Cisco’s TelePresence—exist uniquely outside the above hierarchy. Billed as tools that can restore the intimacy lost when in-person communications are not possible, the reality of the technology makes it the most formal of all virtual communications given the Kabuki-like focus and effort required from participants.
My advice is that sales reps should approach video conferences as if they were on television—after all, that’s pretty much the case. The flatness of the medium puts a premium on proper posture and gestures that are dramatic enough to be captured on screen but that also do not look straight from a community theater’s production of Hamlet.
Despite the prevalence of virtual communications in Sales, most companies continue to devote time and energy to fighting this trend—in other words, trying to get reps to rely less on virtual communications and instead get out on the road in front of customers. But the reality is that this is global warming, not just a hot summer…these virtual sales interactions are here to stay. Leading companies have stopped fighting an unwinnable fight and have started refocusing their efforts on equipping reps to be successful in this new world by teaching them the do’s and don’ts of virtual selling.