“Don’t be scared of the video. Make time to actually connect with folks over video.” – Reuben Swartz in today’s Tip 433
How about you? Are you having more video conversations?
Join the conversation below and check his post with some video calls tips!
Simple Video Call Tips
Sales for Nerds Podcast
Reuben Swartz on LinkedIn
Reuben Swartz on Twitter
Mimiran
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Reuben Swartz. Reuben is self introducing so I’m going to let him take it away and then will have some more resources for you at the end:
Reuben Schwartz: Hi Reuben Swartz, founder and member in the CRM for people who hate selling and host and chief nerd on the Sales For Nerds podcast. Here to talk to you about having more conversations and specifically having more video conversations. Email, social media, texting, all this stuff it’s kinda like the fast food of human interaction. It’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s convenient, but it’s really not very nourishing and it’s one thing if we use those tools to set up real conversations. It’s another thing if we consider them replacements for actual conversation. So both from a business perspective, pipeline perspective and just from a human psychology perspective, we need to be having conversations with people. That’s what we do. That’s how we exist. It’s one thing in quote-unquote normal times. Maybe we do a bunch of emailing and texting and so on and then we get together with people.
Now that Corona is forcing us to socially distance ourselves from folks. We want to use technology to overcome that. So by all means, pick up the phone. A phone call is exponentially more interesting, communicates exponentially more information than an email, a text, some kind of interaction on social media. But what I really encourage you to do is video call people, whether it’s through Zoom or Skype or FaceTime or whatever. Actually seeing people as important, especially when we’re kind of shut-in right now. And I’m actually going so far as to force myself to record this as a video, which Scott always likes people to do. But I don’t want to do that cause I don’t want to see myself on video. Right? Just like everybody else. But it’s really what we need to be doing because we’re supposed to be seeing people not just talking to them.
One thing to have the phone call one weekend, also see them at some other time or we just got out of a meeting with them and we call them back the next day. But if we’re not seeing people for weeks or months, that’s going to cause a bunch of problems. Psychologically we’re supposed to see people we care about, and also from a business perspective, it’s a lot harder to build trust without actually seeing people.
So there’s a million tutorials out there on how to set up your office for video calling. I’m not going to reiterate that. If you need a quick, very amateurish one, you can go to mimiran.com and see a video that I posted about my setup. But you can tell it’s not the worst set up in the world, but it’s certainly not a professional level. But the point is it’s good enough to interact with people and it’s good enough that I shouldn’t stop interacting with people while I try to get the setup to be fancier.
Now the next thing is we just want to have a lot of conversations. That’s what we should be doing. And if you’re a salesperson who has 50 conversations a day already, make sure you keep that up. Try to do it over video. If you’re the kind of person like I was who would have a couple of conversations a day and think that was a lot, it can actually be so much easier than you think. If you have just a handful of conversations. Each one has a lot of pressure, tends to make it harder, awkward or et cetera, and that reinforces itself in a vicious cycle. If you have a lot of conversations, it takes all the pressure off each one. Yes, we want to be professional, we want to show up, we want to close the deals that we need to close. We want to help the clients that we need to help, but sometimes calls are going to go wrong. Sometimes they’re going to get rescheduled. Sometimes deals are going to go south in ways that we don’t control no matter what. And if we have a healthy pipeline, not just of quote-unquote deals, but of conversations. That stuff will play out and it will be fine. We don’t have a lot of pressure. We don’t have to act like we’re trying to avoid getting a set of steak knives or getting fired, we’re just there to help folks.
So especially now block off time in your calendar to be calling people. If you’ve got prescheduled calls, obviously that’s great, but otherwise, just go through the people that you want to talk to. And of course, that’s prospects, clients, partners, those urgent calls and hopefully, we’re making those. But I know from my own experience and from talking to a lot of other people, sometimes those things fall off the plate too. And then it’s also the interesting people that we want to talk to, especially now, right? Parents, cousins, friends, spouses who are stuck somewhere else. Have those conversations and if possible, have them over video. Make sure also that you’re just talking to the interesting people that you like talking to that give you energy and business will come from this. It may not come from this call or that call, but over time business will come in a way that lets you relax and just focus on having an interaction, a human interaction with people as opposed to “I’ve got to close”, “I’ve got to close”, “I’ve got to close.”
Now, the one thing I do want to mention about the video, people tend to know, you know, keep your thing at eye level and try to look at the light and so on. But tip from Vanessa van Edwards on Sales for Nerds, she’s brilliant by the way. Check her out. Try to make it more like a face to face interaction where you can see someone’s hands, especially in sales hands are all about trust. We are programmed as humans to be a little suspicious when we can’t see someone else’s hands and if you’re doing this and try to have a conversation, that’s not how we have conversations. We have conversations actually further back but we should at least be able to see what someone’s doing with their hands. That’s going to help with trust tremendously and if you do get in a situation where you’re doing a video call and then you share documents and screens and so on, make sure that you don’t just close the meeting down after that. Go back to the face to face video though same way you would if you were huddling over documents in person before you wrap up. And as the enforcer said, only connect. This is the best tool we’ve got right now. Don’t be scared of the video. Make time to actually connect with folks over video.
Scott Ingram: If you’ll click over to DailySales.Tips/433 you’ll find not only the video version of Reuben’s tip, but also links to his post with some video calls tips and his Reconnection Challenge.
Once you’ve clicked over and read through those, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!