198: Virtual Selling - How To Gain Customer Trust

<p>Meeting a potential new customer online is a daunting prospect for salespeople.  All of the skills we have built up have been tailored and refined for the face to face environment.  Being in the same room with someone allows us to really get their vibe, microscopically analyse their body language, clearly hear what they have to say and in turn, be heard by the customer.  The online world negates almost all of those finely honed skills.  In particular, given our usual tried, true and tested modus operandi has been vanquished, how do we build trust with people who don’t know us and can barely even see or hear us?</p> <p> </p> <p>When we go to the reception area of a client’s office, the person we are meeting will come out and collect us and then we move to the meeting room or we may have already been shown into the meeting room by the reception staff.  In both cases the first impression will be vital.  If we are sitting nicely, behaving ourselves in reception and the client approaches us, we are very conscious that this first interaction has a strong bearing on how things will go.  Producing a brilliant first impression is what separate the great salespeople from the rest of the punters. </p> <p>The same applies when they enter the meeting room, where we have been sitting waiting for them to arrive.  We look them in the eye and smile before we stand.  When we do get up, we stand up straight and greet them.  Things are a bit different today. Wearing a face mask puts all of the weight on your eyes, to convey that smile.  When we are online we can dispense with the face mask, but we have another mask controlling us and that is the screen.  The size of our face in a little box will vary depending on how many others are in the meeting and who is talking.  There is also the issue of their face on screen is at least ten centimetres below our camera lens, so if we are looking at their face, it appears we are talking down to them the whole time.  Also, how can we gauge their reaction to what we are saying, if we are look