Sales

Lead generation and prospecting

• Do you have many contacts who might be interested in your product or service? With conferencing you can get them all together at once for the sales pitch, hold interactive Q&A sessions, turn leads into opportunities and gain their interest with visual online demonstrations.
• When trying to prospect for key contacts within a company, you are much more likely to get a half hour call with them than a face-to-face meeting so use conferencing in this instance and improve your conversion rates.

CRM – client relationship management

• Maximise the potential of your client whenever an opportunity comes up, by using "always on" conferencing accounts in your name, which enable you to organise a conference call/virtual meeting at a moment's notice, whenever the client is free and without having to book it beforehand.
• You can improve the amount of interaction and communication you have with the client, raising your visibility so you and your company are at the forefront of their minds.
• Administration such as contract amendments and accounting issues can be dealt with in an online meeting without the need to physically be together, saving both you and the client time and money.
• The more interaction you have with the client, the easier is it to harvest and retain them.

Sales cycle

• Face-to-face meetings are important during the sales cycle, however using conferencing for quick conversations and discussions in between speeds up the sales process, allowing you better access to your clients, who can then make decisions more quickly.
• Use conferencing during the sales cycle and you could save up to 21 hours of travel per month* - that's almost a whole day to manage more clients and opportunities and ultimately generate more revenue.
• Conference between physical meetings and you could get the revenue in before the end of the quarter rather than having to wait.
• See below example of a sales cycle with conferencing.

Sales team and pipeline management

• Managing a team of remote sales people and getting them together for team meetings is an arduous task, due to their preference to be selling rather than travelling to a team meeting. Use conferencing to replace the face-to-face meetings and save up to 80 hours of travel time* for each monthly meeting or have all the benefits of a face-to-face meeting, by holding a video conference instead.
• Encourage your team to share best practice, competitive information, hints and tips, leads and wins using conferencing
• Hold weekly one-to-one's with your team to keep up to date with the pipeline opportunities.
• Brief the pipeline potential back to your Sales Director, Finance Director and MD immediately via a call to keep them up to date on sales activity.

*Statistics based on customer survey about conferencing usage, conducted by BT Conferencing to 4293 end users between October and December 2005. (1st: Based on 3 hour face-to-face event, 100 participants, 50 travelling to attend vs event web conference at 41p per min. 2nd: based on 15 people travelling to a team meeting)

Reporting

• So many people within the business want to know your results, forecasts, budgets, revenue predictions, market potential and much more. Briefing it out separately to each group, and even agreeing the final figures with management and finance can prove a nightmare. Simplify the process with conferencing and sign off all reporting on one call with the relevant stakeholders.
• Brief it out to the company or relevant teams all at once, on one event call, with a visual presentation, to ensure a consistent message.
• The people that missed it can simply listen to the recording rather than you having to present it again and again.

Contract development and amendment

• Don't slow the sales cycle down having to wait for face-to-face meetings with clients to discuss contract amendments and changes.
• Set up an online conference with all relevant stakeholders and work through all of the issues in real time, amending the documents live as you go, therefore finishing the meeting with a completed contract.

Competitor and best practice information sharing

• As sales professionals, you need to stay ahead of the competition at all times and be aware of significant market changes. Competitor information e.g. a new product launch can be quickly and easily briefed out to all sales people using conferencing so you can be up to date at all times.
• Did you have a pitch that went particularly well? Show your colleagues via web conference by taking them through the presentation, demonstration and discussions that were had.

Training

• Training is essential but can get in the way of key selling time and mean you need to physically attend a location. Manage this more effectively by holding shorter training courses online for larger groups, so your sales people only have to be at a computer with an internet connection and have a phone.
• Remote workers receive the benefit of the training, more time to sell and you obtain higher attendance rates as it's more convenient.