FaceTime Fun – New Media Tools

For all our divisions meetings I do presentations, mostly about marketing and changing consumer trends. For about half of the divisions I also do sales training.
In the last several years I have been adding in digital media communication to our training. In today’s world you can be contacted by e-mail (gosh so old school!) text messaging, Facebook messages, Twitter…the list goes on and on. How do you respond through all these channels?

For years I have had sales people telling me they are selling units via email and now text. Is an email or text indicating an agreement on a price to take the unit legally binding? Is the sale actually closed? Are these channels any different than customers indicating the same thing over the phone? Because it is in writing, is there more legal weight behind the interaction? All good questions…

Part of the training I have been conducting is focusing on how to respond in the different mediums: conversation in person, over the phone, via e-mail or text messaging, and social media all have to be handled differently, and some of our team do not realize that. They go for the close just as they would if they had the person in their office. Or they funnel the conversation to get the person into their office to close…but more on this later.

So where does the title of this post come in: FaceTime Fun? Recently, I supported a salesperson at another dealership two hours away by “facetiming” their customer. Why FaceTime? It seemed to be the medium of choice in order to conduct a presentation to the customer as they sat in their living room. The unit is a complex concession trailer and needed a subject matter expert (me, the Trailer Division Manager one of my hats) to present and answer questions. So the salesperson asked me(via e-mail) to help conduct the presentation to the customer. FaceTime is not new to me, nor should it be new to you, but it was new to me as a presentation sales tool.

The presentation went great! The customer’s daughter lived in Saskatoon where I work so she held the phone to follow me around as I went through the trailer. The customer asked questions so the presentation was interactive. In fact, I was able to conduct the “circle selling” format (start at the hitch and work your way around the trailer, then go inside) that I teach salespeople to do when presenting in person. At the end of the presentation, I closed with questions: “do you have everything you need to make a decision? Anything else you would like to see?” In this case I knew the customer was being handled by a salesperson so I did not want to end with pressure close tactics.

This leads me back to email, texting and social media: do you use pressure close tactics in these mediums? Can you? Should you? I suppose it all depends on the context of the conversation and channel used. With text and social media, in some cases having that connection implies an existing relationship. If you have an existing relationship, this may be the way the customer wants to be communicated with; in that case answer the questions and close away.

However, if you are answering a general inquiry through email or social media, the customer is usually seeking help and information, and is in the evaluation stage of the sales funnel. They do not want hard close tactics and in most instances hard close tactics will end the conversation as opposed to continuing it. This fact has frustrated some of our sales team from time to time; they wonder why the customer will not just call them so they can close the sale. We live in a 24 hour, always on world, and maybe the customer does not have time during the business day to call, or does not want to call because they do not want to deal with close tactics. Either way, if the conversation has been started, do not stunt it; nourish it and build a relationship, eventually the customer may call or just purchase via email.

Another way to look at it is to think of the first email like it is the first sentence in a face to face customer interaction. If during the first email a salesperson goes for a close, that is the equivalent to asking a hard close question within the first sentence of an in-person presentation. “Yes we have that unit in stock it is $10,995. Will you be paying cash or financing?” In my many years of sales that has never worked, so I should not expect to close a new customer with the first email.

There are many, many new media tools and many, many ways to use them to market and sell. Be creative, have fun, but be mindful of the medium. Different tactics need to be used for the different channels in order to reach the same result.