Sales managers know that the best way to get a prospect to a ‘Yes’ is by building trust. Studies show that trustworthiness is essential to building strong relationships. There are three main ways that salespeople can build trust with prospects over Zoom:
- Establish Credibility – That means not only the credibility of your company or your product, but also the credibility of the salesperson.
- Forge Authenticity – Deeply understanding a person’s problems and reflecting it back to them is a powerful driver of an authentic connection. It also comes from a salesperson that is open, honest, and connects on a human-level with the prospect.
- Finding Commonality – Your company may have worked with their competitors, and therefore understand their problems possibly better than they do. This principle is also about the people in the rooms finding commonalities around hobbies, location, weather, kids, and things of that nature.
In 2022, the sales email sequence is still the most effective way to generate leads and lay the foundation of trust for your brand. How effective is it? Even in 2019, before every corporate employee in the world was plugged in 24/7, the ROI on email marketing was 4,200%.
Your sales development representatives have worked hard to send the email sequences. Those email sequences work, whether it’s the fifth attempt or the 10th. At some point, one of your value propositions resonates with the prospect and brings them to the table.
Once the prospect is logged in, however, most sales team stop the slow drip of showing them all the different things your company can do. Instead, many sales teams word vomit everything the product can do in a hard-hitting sales pitch—to the point that it drives them away. Or they hyperfocus on the one thing the prospect responded to in the marketing process, ignoring all the other aspects that would actually help make the sale.
What if there was a way to keep up the automated email sequences—without the automated email sequences?
Top sellers today continue building trust beyond the email sequence and into the first meeting with a new concept we call “Automated Ambient Messaging.”
Automated Ambient Messaging
Say the company just completed its Series C. This is a huge vote of confidence from investors, and would tell prospective clients that your business has a track record of success. You could randomly throw it out during a sales meeting. Or you can have creative assets advertising this news automatically pop up in ordinary communication your sales team is already having with prospects in the buying cycle.
Warmly is a customer experience platform that helps VPs of Sales continue ambient messaging through previous touch points with prospects and clients: their email signatures, calendar invites, and Zoom backgrounds.
These messages will also appear alongside the individual touches of the salesperson like hobbies, location, and fun facts. All of a sudden, it’s not an ad, but a bonus of the relationship they’re building with the salesperson.
The outcome is that your sales team is building trust with prospects faster and more organically. That means shorter buying cycles, and increased sales because you are effectively conveying to prospects all the value that you can bring, one bite-sized chunk at a time.
Excited to see how? Here are just a few ideas to get you started.
1. Case Study – Do you know from experience that certain verticals respond strongly to case studies? An easy way to establish credibility with prospects is ending that follow-up email prospect with a QR code to the case study. Check out this QR code of a Case Study Gainsight did with Warmly!
2. Credentials – A great way to establish credibility is by sharing credentials on your Zoom background. Maybe your company has been rated great place to work, or your flagship software is rated highly on G2 Crowd. You can also use employee’s credentials, such as their school, degrees, years of experience in industry, or related certifications.
3. List Actual Benefits – For every industry you’re targeting, identify how you are solving problems for companies in those arenas. You can even have this information.
4. Title-based Value Props – Think about what value proposition would most resonate with the person you’re targeting. A Chief Data Officer would have different business priorities and pain points than, say, a Head of Digital.
5. Corporate Social Responsibility – If you’re meeting with a prospect or company known for being charitable, you can ambiently highlight things your own firm is doing. Maybe have the bio line in your Zoom background include that “We’re raising $8 million for Feeding America this year.”
6. Location – Having employees put their current location and local weather is an easy, no-effort way to both find commonality and forge authenticity. If you want to go even more granular, have employees list the places they have been and auto-match those with where the prospects are located. Now your entire sales team will have an immediate warm starting point for conversation.
7. Company Commonality – Imagine sticking an overlap of your company’s logo with the prospect company’s logo in every email, Calendar link, and Zoom meeting. Warmly is working on a ‘History of Partnership’ page that catalogues all the times your mutual companies have interacted including a log of meetings, and other shared similarities.