Selling Remotely or In-Person: Agency Edition

Welcome to Inbound Sales Journey. If you want to hone your sales skills and learn from the leaders on inbound selling, you've come to the right place. This episode of Inbound Sales Journey is brought to you by the Agency Sales System, the online course designed specifically to teach you how to build a rock solid agency sales system inside your HubSpot CRM. Learn more at doinbound.com salescourse. Now here are your hosts, Ryan and Gray.

Welcome back to this week's Inbound Sales Journey episode. Ryan and I, last week we talked about what's the right amount of time to spend with someone during your sales process. That was a good episode. Got some good feedback on that one. If you haven't heard that yet, head back, listen to that one. But today we're going to be talking about another topic. Now, this may not, this may not apply to everyone. I don't know. I've been surprised by how many people are still on the road to close sales. And maybe that's, maybe that's silly, maybe that's just a sign of my age. But that's basically, you're so old or young. Well, I was gonna go with young, but maybe, maybe not gonna say maybe.

It's like a new fad coming back. It's like, it's like vinyls.

That's so answering the question, should you get out on the road, beat the streets, meet up with people face to face to close sales, or beat the streets? I did say beat the streets.

Now you see mold.

Okay, that's fair. I'll just flip flop back and forth in this episode here. But, but, or, or should you close deals remotely? And obviously the background here is a lot of leads that come in probably for the majority of agencies listening aren't close to them, aren't in close geographical proximity to the agency themselves. There are, I think in a lot of cases, especially if you're located around some kind of hub, if you're in a city, you'll get referrals and there will be people who, through networking and depending on what your lead generation channel and strategy is, this may be really common for you. And maybe you close most of your deals face to face, or maybe if you're like us, most of the deals are closed remotely without ever meeting. So with that said, Ryan, I'm going to hand things over to you to walk through the pros and cons of trying to close deals, getting out, getting in person, closing deals face to face.

Pounding the pavement, you might say, sitting.

On your computer and using Skype, Uber Conference, zoom, whatever. You're using the old, real old school. Going with the phone, maybe fax.

Not the game was fax.

Telegram maybe possibly the new app. That's true. It's not that new but fair enough. Anyways, what's right and what's wrong.

Yeah, so I want to talk about this because about two to three weeks ago I was talking with an agency owner out in California and I really haven't met too many agency owners or at least maybe it just hasn't come up that travel outside of really their city face to face to meet people. And he. So he's in California and he flies to. He has a bunch of clients in Idaho and in think it was Tucson. So you know, not like all country.

Well, that other state. Yeah, I know Idaho doesn't even have any cities that you're like. Boise.

I was going to say Boise. Yeah, that's the one.

Tiny Osborne, Idaho. Yeah. Northern part of the state. 1,200 people live there.

You have family there?

I do have family there. So I know Osborne.

There you go. Yeah, the great state of Tucson. So he has a lot of traveling. So anyways, that's a big thing though for him selling. He was telling me he doesn't really like those are where his clients are and he'll fly. So he only works with clients that are on the west coast. Not super far away, but still. I mean he said that he. Yeah, he. I mean travels monthly to go visit them from a client servicing side as well and. And kind of meet with them. But he also does a lot of sales opportunities that way too. And I thought it was really interesting because. So I love. If I can get face to face with someone, I just prefer it so much more compared to selling digital. I mean from I guess my real estate or my background in real estate, that's what I was used to. Kind of always sitting down face to face and meeting with people and I just really enjoyed it. And it was a bit of a transition for me going to doing things digitally. But obviously like we're working in a digital space. It's way more acceptable to do things digitally and you can greatly increase your scope. So there's definitely pros and cons to it. We've had international clients that we obviously it just wouldn't have been feasible for us to fly there. And I think where it's tricky in the sales like you have to be pretty confident that you're gonna be able to close the deal in order to just make the. Not just the money investment but the Time investment that it takes, because when you're traveling, you're. You're traveling like you're not working nearly efficient as efficiently as if you're, hey, that, you know, that sales call didn't go well. I've lost an hour or two, but I'm still here, and I can just roll into the next thing that I'm doing. It's always harder when you're traveling. So that's like a big con that I think. People always think, well, I have to buy flights and go out there in a hotel and stuff. But they don't really consider their time, which can definitely be wasted. I'm intrigued by it, though. I mean, what I'd like to have happen is just people listening. If you want to share with us what you guys do. And I think it's just maybe a topic that doesn't come up as much. So maybe I'm wrong and more people are traveling. But I think most people do it remotely. Now, what I will say is one big advantage is because I think most people are doing it remotely. If you're willing to travel and go meet someone, I mean, how much better are your odds of closing that deal? Assuming that you. You connect well with them while you're there, What a way for your agency to stand out. So certainly, I mean, if someone's in your city, drive there, like, meet them in person. We've done that a bunch of times. Andrew and I both have gone and done that. Gray, you, I think you've met. Yeah. You've met with plenty of customers as well. Um, it's just a great. I think, I think you greatly increase your odds if you can do it in person. Is it worth flying? I think it either has to be a really strong referral and a pretty big deal, I think, for us to ever do that. But definitely a good differentiator there. So. Yeah. Curious to know if. If you guys listening, if that's something you. You do or not.

Yeah, I think without a doubt, the biggest variable here is what's the industry that you're trying to get that the prospect is in? You know, do you just have one industry that you're servicing for us, a lot of technology companies as one of the primary verticals and chief client bases, a lot of those folks are selling software just like we are around the world without meeting most of their customers face to face, really at any point. Or, you know, a lot of times, like in our case, they're meeting them at conferences after someone's already a customer or already a prospect or whatever, but understanding the type of business you're going to service and who that is. So in the technology space, it's almost just assumed with most companies that you're going to be talking with them via a conference call and that's. We've also serviced a lot of companies who have distributed teams where not everyone's together anyways. So if you happen to be together and you're able to meet up in person, that's fine, but it's not an expectation in that industry versus we go back and look at kind of the earlier days of Guavabox and servicing the industrial manufacturing niche, that was an expectation that, you know, you would meet in person a lot more frequently. And so we had a couple clients we met with very frequently in person and then folks where, you know, about four hours away from where we were located in and took a couple trips out there to meet them a year. So I think just understanding who am I selling to, what's their expectation? And that's gonna be a big difference and something that a lot of people don't think about. A lot of people just think, what do I want to do? Do I like to fly? Do I like to go travel for work? And here's a good excuse, but really it comes down to who are you servicing and what's gonna set you up to match their expectations in terms of that obviously balanced with what makes sense. Just because you're in an industry where people meet face to face, it's not worth a cross country flight to go close a tiny $5,000 website project or something that you're going to do. So understand what are the pros and cons and definitely the time element, that's a big commitment. If you're going to make that, like I said, that four hour drive, there goes, if you're going to go out there, have a meeting or a couple meetings back to back, there goes an entire day for you if you're the person who's actually driving. So yeah, that'd be mine.

Like Cleveland and stuff, you know, just a few hours away.

Absolutely. Big website project, customer hour and a half, two hours away. Absolutely. Make the trip out there to close the deal and I guess it's maybe one more tip for that deal specifically. Started the process on the phone, walked through the whole thing, drove out there with a contract to be signed that they already knew was coming, knew it was coming, went out there to meet them and basically the whole goal of going out to meet them in person was connect and don't blow anything up, make sure that what they've talked to on the phone and their expectation is lines up with what you have going on there. So set some expectations before you go meet with people. Have them understand what. What this is going to be. If it's going to be an initial conversation about something where you're scoping things out. And it's more almost of a strategy piece that's almost like a discovery project, maybe something that should be its own paid thing. Don't be afraid to have the conversation if you are making a trip about who's paying for what. If it's during the sales process, typically that's going to be assumed that you are covering that yourself. If it's client work and you're going out there, there might be a different assumption about that. But. But the goal is not to have any assumptions, just to clear that up and make sure that that's clear and you want to set those expectations early in most cases. I don't like to ask clients to. I really like what Jonathan Dane said on Inbound Agency Journey in his episode here not too long ago. Just talking about the principle of charge the client enough so that you never have to charge them again. So make sure that you're charging them enough money where it's not going to break your profit margins or your bank to go make a trip to go see them. You charge them $10,000 a month. It's no big deal to spend time or money to get out and go see them every once in a while. So those are my tips there. That's what I'd think about and weigh into this. If you guys have other advice, like Ryan was saying, definitely let us know. Always enjoy hearing from people. This is one that hasn't really come up a lot until recently and then had this question a couple times, so wanted to want to tackle it here. So we'll wrap things up right there next week. Episode 106 Ryan and I are going to be talking about another situation. This one comes up more frequently. Handling competitive situations. What do you do when you're selling against another agency or another service provider? And specifically you have multiple agencies in the same field offering some of the same things? How do you differentiate yourself and close the deal? So we'll get into that next week. Until then, rock on.