Making Your Screen Selling Clean Selling

I was prompted to create that title from a reminder of one of those now derided 'successorize' style taglines when reading about collab ideas; team work is what makes the dream work.

Yep. Clichéd, hackneyed, old-fashioned.

I did feel compelled though, to rhyme with 'clean' over 'dream'. Yet in remix form above, I sense it's a neat little jolt for those conducting sales meetings over video.

Which should be all of us.

One of the biggest mis-steps I've seen is when sellers take a meeting they'd typically have run countless times in-person (or on the phone), and try replicate it in its entirety over video.

Spoiler alert. This doesn't work.

I think the most obvious example is the 'discovery' call.

I realise that selling lingo is split on this.

The term being applied in equal measure to both an exploratory solution bid first-meeting, as well as that initial workshop with the prospect once there's a project green light blinking your way to detail how it'd all take shape.

Which one you use is likely dependent on your winning process.

But for the purposes of this blog post, it kind of doesn't matter much.

In the former, you're focused on a framework to I.D. the pain, understand who's involved and how, why any decision gets made, and level of urgency.

In the latter, you're more about showing how the closest fit of your uniques matches to their desires, linked to implementation expectation setting. Whilst fine-tuning complexities if necessary for any of those topics from the former.

In either case though, using video as the medium requires a conscious tweaking.

What's more, I'd suggest, this is best done as examining the whole prospect journey. Specifically to assess which 'touches' are best suited to which of the four options. Those being IRL, audio-only, text & video call.

It might be easier to understand this approach by thinking about what constitutes un-clean selling over video.

Imagine for instance, your first-call routine. After shaking hands, glancing around the room for front talk inspo, and wondering aloud how you've not yet gone no-milk or no-sugar, the pro can effortlessly glide through rapport to engagement to relationship build. Uncovering buying gems along the way.

Trying this same sequencing on video I have seen spluttering encounters. Reduced akin to being stopped in the street by a student asking you to fill out their questionnaire.

The scope you get to double-check everything is surprisingly widened over video. Take advantage of that fact.

You can produce an agenda. You can even follow it. You can prime with pre-engagement. You can write down learnings and show them back to the webcam. You can draw a diagram on an actual piece of paper, redraw, ask for tips. You can mark-up on a makeshift calendar. You can calc a basic P&L, Cost-Benefit or payback equations on that mini-whiteboard you've no doubt bought online back in '20. You can formally summarise at the conclusion.

And while you're doing all this (and more), your prospect may well be thinking, 'blimey, this is a better experience than their competition served up...'.