6 Ways to Enhance Sales with Video Conferencing

There’s a lot of advice and tips to help you improve your company’s sales. The bulk of them have one thing in common: you’ve got to connect with the customer. Far from being a gimmick, video conferencing enhances your sales process by allowing you to show your smile to the customer and look them in the eye, even from half a world away. Here are some other ways that video conferencing can enhance your sales.
1. Visit More Often – Going on a sales trip to visit a client is an important aspect of the customer relationship. Especially if you have to travel a great distance, it shows that you value them as a customer enough to go the extra mile. If you start using video conferences, it won’t mean you will never shake that customer’s hand again, but rather you will get to see them much more often than before. More visits equal a firmer relationship which equals more sales.
2. Visual Cold-Calling – For most salespeople, selling to a stranger face-to-face is easier than cold-calling, but if you can’t walk into their office use a video conference instead. Ask your potential customer to get in front of their computer and tell them to navigate to a link on your website. When they click it, a program loads the video conference and shows your smiling face. It’s no longer a cold-call; it’s now a friendly sales visit.
3. Record and Review – A great benefit of video conferences is the ability to record them. After that sales meeting, or great pitch to a customer, you can go back and review. How did you sound? Did you forget to say anything? Do you notice any fidgeting, tics, or other undesirable habits? How can you make yourself look and sound better? Remember to share these recordings with your sales staff so that they can improve as well.
4. Use Your Recordings – If you record your video conferences, you don’t want to let them sit in your computer gathering dust. Even after you have reviewed and used them for your own purposes, the recordings are still valuable. Upload your recordings and allow customers to view or download them. Mention them in your advertising as an enticement to drive new or potential customers to your website.
5. Multiplicity – Until the laws of physics are changed, you can only physically be in one place at any given time. There is a loophole for this rule if you use video conferences. You have to be in front of your webcam, that’s a given, but any number of people can be watching you, almost anywhere in the world, all at the same time. Smile to everyone, say your piece, and answer their questions -- just as if they were in the same room and not spread across the globe. Now that’s great multi-tasking.
6. Widen Your Audience – Capitalize on the idea of “one physical, but many video locations.” You don’t have to only address individuals at their individual computers. In addition to them, add a conference room full of people watching you on the flat-screen TV. Or fill up an auditorium and have the projector hooked up to a laptop. You may be stuck in one spot, but you can still talk to large groups of people worldwide with video conferences.