You’re trying to develop rapport. You’re qualifying their needs. You’re trying to establish value. This is all done fairly informally, usually over the phone. Maybe the customer likes what you’re saying and wants to see a demo or presentation. At this point, you don’t know them very well. The relationship is young, but you have a good rapport. You’ve invested a lot of time and effort into this prospect and you have a great feeling. You send off a web meeting invitation. When the time comes for a meeting, they are late. Once they arrive, it turns out they had a hard time getting into the meeting. They had to get their IT department to approve the downloading of the meeting software. As they are explaining this issue, you find it hard to understand their story over the crackle, hiss and cutting out of the audio. You know this meeting isn’t going to go well. Maybe everything else is working. They are in the meeting and you’re demonstrating your software, but the screen share is latent. As you’re explaining the software, the prospect is having a hard time following along because you are speaking a full minute ahead of what they are seeing. The marketing department just spent a large budget on a new sales video, but you are scared to show it because you’re fairly certain it won’t work. So you email the link to the prospect and hope that they watch it on their own time. The meeting ends, you’re frustrated, the prospect is frustrated and you’re determined to never let this stupid meeting platform ruin your chances at getting a commission ever again. In this example, you, the salesperson, is already adapting. Salespeople, by nature, are usually very adaptable. So when something goes wrong, they go about it a different way. Rather then use the tools given to them, they send a link or a e-mail and talk over the phone. But this is missing out on the opportunity to use those assets the way they are meant to be used. They miss out on real time feedback and the ability to control what the prospect is looking at, at any given time. This isn’t a very good representation of your company or an effective use of the time they have procured with the prospect. With today’s technology these symptoms should not be an issue. If your sales people are not using your web conferencing tool, the medium is clearly bringing some issues. Put simply, they don’t have enough confidence in the tool to trust it to help them close deals. But there are tools designed to breed confidence. There are about 120 different web conferencing solutions on the market. I would say only 4 or 5 work well enough to make salespeople confident enough to use them. These all have a few things in common. They are: Don’t settle for mediocrity. If your virtual meeting tools aren’t helping your team close deals, then you are settling. Investing in excellent web conferencing that works with your sales team’s objective doesn’t necessarily mean you end up paying an arm and a leg either; it just means you’ve chosen the right one. Especially when you consider that your current meeting software may be ruining your sales calls. So are you going to settle or are you going to make sure your team has the best tools to close deals. To find out what the best web conferencing platform is for your team, sign up for a free Conference Consultation. 
Wondering why your sales team isn’t using the web conferencing solution available to them? Most often this is because the tool is falling short of the goal. It’s not really helping them to get over the barriers to success and might even be creating more. Let’s take a step into their world and see why that might be the case.
