MAY 2020
How to Connect With and Sell to Your Customers Virtually
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the urgency to replace face-to-face relationships with virtual selling. “Let’s be clear,” said Shawn Casemore of the Unstoppable Business Network. ‘You can shift to selling virtually without having to hire technology experts, buy expensive software or invest in expensive online advertising.” Casemore provided a free webinar for CWPCA members earlier this May.
Casemore noted that if your customer communications focus on email, telephone and face-to-face meetings, this may be a bad time. Face-to-face meetings aren’t possible. Furthermore, unless you know the client’s cell number, you might have trouble connecting. Chances are, there is no one in the customer’s office to pick up the phone. And then we are left with email. Very likely, he observed, your customers are buried in emails and are not responding in a timely way.
Using a social network such as LinkedIn or others, you can take your customer list, find them online and then ask them to link. With LinkedIn, once you find the customer profile page, you can look at the bottom to find out their interests and gain an understanding of where they spend their time on social media.
Once you have connected with customers, the next step is to get their attention. By spending some time sharing content and interacting online with them, Casemore said, you can build relationships and create opportunities to sell.
The next step in the process is understanding how to flip your in-person pitch to a virtual sale. The process involves breaking down the in-person sales cycle into steps with an eye to how in-person interactions can be replaced with virtual ones.
Casemore emphasized that it is possible to speed up your virtual sales cycle and provide better consistency through automated processes. When you have multiple salespeople, an inconsistent sales approach can be a concern. “When you use automation and you sell virtually, or at least you start the sales process, virtually, what you're doing is creating consistency, because you're using tools, and you're writing the scripts.”
Casemore mentioned some tools that may be useful for online selling. One is the website chatbot, which has been proven to be an effective tool in generating leads,and it is typically
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inexpensive to add to your website. He cited Tidio (www.tidio.com) as a free chatbot to consider. Working with one client, they hired an entry-level person, provided limited training, and supported her with appropriate scripts to address customer queries. Another tool he mentioned was Calendly, a free software product for meeting scheduling. Using Calendly (www.calendly.com) can help eliminate all of the back and forth emails that can be generated in trying to agree on a meeting time. Casemore described it as a great tool you can add to your email signature to allow people to easily schedule a meeting.
To find out more about how Shawn Casemore and his F.A.S.T. virtual sales system, visit www.fastsalessystem.com.