Host Better Virtual Sales Meetings With These 5 Tips

It’s been a long time since the term “sales call” meant calling a long list of phone numbers with the hopes that one lead might want to buy what you’re selling. These days, virtual selling has transformed — sales calls can take place in person, over the phone, or online.

Virtual sales meetings refer to any event where a salesperson uses video, social media, or the internet to reach clients and sell a product. In this article, we'll walk you through how to plan a successful call and how to create a compelling product demo.

Virtual sales meetings vs. face-to-face meetings

Face-to-face sales meetings are often time-consuming, full of unnecessary decorum, and costly. Especially if your business is already based online, there’s no reason to force face-to-face sales for every single client.

Virtual communication has much more range and can be altered to fit your business. This includes anything from webinars to sales demos. You can really get creative with how you use them to drive sales, whether you’re hosting an online event or doing a livestream.

The financial cost of hosting a client's buying committee at your business includes all the costs of having a presentable, pleasing office space — something that most modern businesses don’t have or need. Or, if you have to travel to them, you have all the costs associated with getting to the meeting.

Both the customer and the business will spend time getting to the meeting, setting up, breaking down, and getting back. Why start your sales meetings off with having your potential customer sit in traffic when you could give them the opportunity to hop onto a livestream or register for a webinar in seconds?

When you host virtual sales meetings, you also give yourself access to a valuable recording. You can reuse this content over and over again, and you can distribute that recording to all attendees right after the event.

Virtual sales meetings also allow you to gather important information and leads from your sales call, like attendees’ email addresses. Use the metrics provided — like poll data or click-through rates during the call — to gain important knowledge about your sales performance.

The more engagement features you use during your virtual call, the more metrics and analytics you’ll have. Features like emoji reactions, polling, questions, and chat boxes make it simple to engage with your attendees — and you keep all that data to analyze later.

Even if hosting face-to-face sales meetings makes sense for your business, adding virtual sales to your repertoire is always beneficial. You’ll reach people more meaningfully, make more sales faster, and gather valuable data in the process.

How to organize great virtual sales meetings

The art of a great virtual sales call is certainly a little different than traditional sales calls. Since your audience will be able to see and interact with you, there are some key tricks to bringing your virtual sales meetings up a notch from the uninspired robo-call. Here are some tips for how to organize great virtual sales events.

1. Understand the buyer’s needs

Pertinent to any sales situation is understanding your buyer’s needs. When hosting a virtual sales call, you can narrow your audience even further than you normally would. Plan your sales pitch so that it solves the exact problem your buyer has — and use video to demonstrate how this works.

If you own a SaaS company, for example, virtual sales meetings are an amazing opportunity to showcase how your software would work for a specific client. You can set up a demo, share your screen, and showcase your great software to the potential buyer. You can even add in CTAs to your sales meeting to close the deal.

For virtual meetings, make sure you’re also considering the buyer’s needs when it comes to what they’re looking to get out of the meeting itself. If you sell a physical product and they’d like to hold it or try it, consider sending them a sample and getting on the call to answer questions and showcase specific uses.

2. Build trust with prospects

Video is the best way to grow trust with your potential clients. When they see a real person representing your company, clients are much more likely to feel that they can trust you and the product you sell.

Use this to your advantage by getting creative with what your sales calls look like. When you host a video product demo, you show your customers that your product is functional.

Another great way to use video to grow trust is by answering customer questions. You can gather questions beforehand or host a live question-and-answer session where attendees can ask questions in real time.

The more time your customers spend with your brand, the more likely they are to spread the word to friends or social media circles — even if they don’t realize it!

In addition, they offer a good opportunity to encourage referrals. You could offer a 15% off referral code to all attendees of a webinar about how to host compelling Q&A videos, for example. You could also offer an incentive for anyone who has referred individuals to the sales meeting itself, like a nominal gift card or free content.

3. Demonstrate value

Video sales meetings are great because they can serve many purposes at once. When you host a virtual sales call as opposed to an in-person call, your attendees have a lot more agency. They aren’t sitting in an office chair across from you — they’re sitting at a computer where they can click on links, chat with you, and engage.

This lends itself to an incredible opportunity to demonstrate the value of your product. Especially if you are selling a virtual or online product, you can have attendees try certain features right there in the call.

It’s a good idea to come up with a theme or purpose for your sales call besides simply selling the product. For example, perhaps you can host a sales call that teaches attendees five features of your company’s invoicing software that are helpful for independent contractors.

During the call, you can demonstrate the value of your software for that specific audience — and you’re teaching your clients something new, which adds even more value beyond the product itself.

4. Determine all of the buying influences

When you’re going in for the sale, consider all the reasons your potential customer may not buy right now. Perhaps they’ve mentioned having a tight budget until next quarter, or they’re an HR manager that will have to bring the idea to a director before purchasing.

If your customer isn’t in the right place to buy during the sales call, it isn’t a good idea to try to convince them otherwise — at least not right away. Instead, give them reasons why they need your product now, and give them the opportunity to “get out.” It is important to make the sale today, but it’s even more important to keep the potential lead long enough for them to become an actual client.

5. Follow up after your virtual meeting

After you’ve hosted your virtual meeting, make sure to follow up — just like you would with a traditional sales call. Send a recording of the video to all attendees immediately after the call.

This follow-up should give the potential customer a chance to review the conversation, as well as give them access to other related videos (like a product demo or FAQ). This is your chance to make the final sale if you haven’t already, so make sure to include easy links to wherever your new customer can purchase your product.