No WFH ≠ No Videoing

WFH is dead. WFH is forever.

Whichever side of the divide you sit, besuited or jim-jammed, I contend that this distracting debate sideshow could damage your selling in one vital sense.

If you equate working away from the office as being the only time to zoom, then I strongly recommend a rejig.

Even worse, if the organisation you work for deems video meetings as something to be avoided. Frowned upon. Dismissed as not proper selling.

Any lack of associated, relevant, purposeful infrastructure, design or acknowledgement a damning dagger in the realisation of any actual sales ambitions.

Despite increasing mandates by usurped middle management, corporatists without bottom-line accountability and corner-office dwellers to return to the letterheaded workplace.

If you're still wondering what I'm waffling on about, let me paint this picture.

As someone on their first video sales call in 1998. As someone who founded a sales knowledge management service with clients spanning oceans embracing video connection. As someone who has long seen those that get how video calling can counter any physical distance and propel huge productivity savings inevitably generating greater selling success.

Yes, there are certain people, certain meetings, certain circumstance, where the actual shaking of a hand is the all-or-nothing.

Yet. How do you think telesales operations have lasted these past decades? Multi-site prospects have become happy, longtime clients? Salespeople on different timezones to key customers manage to do their numbers, time and again?

What are the ways of contacting buyers?

There's always been in-person. In our B2B land, the prospect seldom comes to survey our office. There are rare but important times when the potential customer may seek to check out our operations though. Often limited to such as seeing a big demo, for them having an off-site workshop with us, or simply to meet the team especially in terms of delivery. In the main, we travel, we visit them.

Next we've the written word. As I blog here, one candidate for oldest specimen of human writing is that of a hand-delivered invoice, for wine. Mail, and its evolutions. Primarily to speed up receipt. Later developments going beyond the traditionally posted, 'snail mail', letter. Which I still sent as recently as in the early Noughties. Now email can even seem secondary to messaging.

Then there's the aforementioned phone. A century-and-a-half on, remaining the 'distant voice' staple of business dialogue. One stunted/smartened [* delete as to your preference] by the emergence of voicemail settings.

Three categories of established comms.

Now though, a fourth is out the bag.

Video meeting.

If you are a solution seller and you stick to using pretty much exclusively only those first three, I truly struggle to see how you can be maximising your performance. Or not thwarting your potential. (Case of choice depending on whether you're a carrot-or-stick type person.)

Fact: realtime video selling is transformative.

I understand the barrier. When compelled to conduct business that way, resentment, irritation and disregard can spread.

But think of this. You must've been tutored at some stage in how to craft a sales document. From format, to looks, to phrasing.

Pause to consider the difference between your first written efforts, and those of today.

Now ask how your video selling has moved from those first uses to your latest.

I'm sure it has moved on, right?

How? How much? And is it still progressing?

Live videoing is not location dependent.

Every sales step has its ideal medium.

For many you undertake or seek to make, video is not that optimum.

But for some, it is hands-down, nailed-on the one.

Have you I.D.'d these? And have you worked out how to make them sparkle?