Ryan Dohrn shares four tactics for virtual selling: set up proper lighting and audio, unshare your screen between slides to re-engage prospects, use the annotation tool to draw diagrams live, and practice with a partner. Virtual selling is permanent now, so treat it like face-to-face meetings.
Hey friends, Ryan Dohrn here, your global sales coach, and this is your weekly sales training tip. Hope you're doing great. All right, thanks for the questions sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. Here's one from Renee who lives in Tampa. Renee asks, hey Ryan, I'm having trouble selling virtually. It's just not the same. Any tips to make it seem more face-to-face? are greatly appreciated. All right, Renee, hey, we are selling in a virtual world, uh, even though that's, uh, some people are calling it post-COVID and, and we're, you know, COVID's behind us. I think COVID is still in play in most people's minds. So selling virtual has become a part of everything that we do in the sales business. Now, Renee, I would love to be face-to-face with my customers. I always do better when I'm face-to-face, but virtual meetings can be quite good. Let me share a couple things with you. Get over to YouTube and watch the YouTube video that I recorded called How Not to Be a Webcam Zombie. So look that up, How Not to Be a Webcam Zombie. That's the first thing. Set up your camera for success. Now you don't need a big fancy background or a big microphone like I have here, but you just need to make sure you're set up for success with a great microphone, with a good background, or a nice background that makes you look good. That's the first thing. The second thing is unsharing your screen. One of the worst things that salespeople do when they begin to share a slide deck or a presentation is we all share our screens. Then what we don't do is we hardly ever unshare it. Recognize at the end of almost every slide, I encourage you to unshare your screen. Then ask for questions, ask for clarification. And then go back to sharing your screen. It's a great way to re-engage. Next tip I'd love to share with you is get great with your pen tool. So in every system, whether it's Zoom or GoToMeeting or Webex or whatever, there's a pen tool. So when you're sharing your screen, you can actually draw on the screen as well. And I think that pen tool, it kind of goes old school. It's like going back to some Zig Ziglar stuff that I learned early on in my career. When you talk and you draw on your screen to show examples, it's really a great way to re-engage with the customer. So in some cases, you might be selling software or media. Like when I'm doing some of my media sales and I'm trying to show the buyer's journey, like when a customer first sees an ad and then eventually makes a purchase after seeing the ad, I like to draw out that buyer's journey. So get really good at sharing your pen. And then the last thing is really just make sure that you do your best to not be stiff, to not be overly energetic, but make sure you have quite a bit of fun, but to try to keep yourself a little bit under control, but have some good charisma, have some good energy on those virtual calls. The last thing I'll share with you is this: practice. Amateurs wing it and professionals practice. So to get good at virtual calls, you've got to practice those virtual calls. So maybe you've got your spouse, your partner, whatever on the other end of the line. Practice those calls, get good with the technology, and what you'll find is you'll be really good in the virtual sales business. Friends, I teach classes every day about virtual selling, digital selling, how to do it bigger, badder, and better. Reach out to me, love to train your team. Virtually. You can find out more information over at ryandohrn.com. If you're in the media sales business, like a lot of you folks, go over to 360adsales.com. Remember, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. So we're either crazy or we found careers that'll feed our families for a lifetime. All right, friends, we'll see you next time.
