Being on time means winning

The biggest challenge is to interact in a timely manner and keep the attention of a potential customer.

What does it mean to reach out to a customer on time? It means hitting the exact window in their schedule when they are able and even interested in paying attention to you. Especially if you are ahead of their expectations and come to them with a solution to a problem they are facing right now. If you can do that, you will be a king to your clients.

But if you approach a person when they are busy with something else and are not ready to receive your information, you will lose because you will be in the position of an annoying fly. In such a situation, you are unlikely to be saved even by the fact that you offer a potential client a product that he or she desperately needs.

How can you be timely and become a king for your client, not an intrusive fly?

You can rely on simple luck.

But if you’re trying to personalize your offer as much as possible (and the modern customer loves personalization and localization), you can try to study the schedule of the person you’re planning to reach out to. If you imagine scenes like those you might see in an adventurous spy movie, put them out of your mind right away. I have something else in mind. For a modern person, the norm is to lead an open life, leaving a lot of personal information on the Internet. Both directly, by publishing it on social media, for example, and indirectly, for example, in the form of news on a company’s website. Studying this information can be the key that will give you access to the budget of your next client.

This method will also be useful for coping with another difficult task of a modern salesperson – keeping the customer’s attention. It doesn’t matter if you’re having an online meeting or an old-school offline one. Looking at several screens at the same time, interrupting a meeting to reply to someone in a messenger is the norm of modern life.Several channels of information are constantly competing for a person’s attention, and a client during a meeting is no exception.

According to Prezi, 80% of business professionals distract themselves during a presentation. At the same time, 20% of viewers of online presentations constantly look at another screen (Decktopus).

Therefore, a salesperson must develop his or her own tactics for keeping attention. Here’s what I can advise based on my own experience, the experience of my colleagues, and recent research:

• A presentation or a meeting (in our case, it’s the same thing) should be as brief as possible. Long business conversations are a thing of the past. If you schedule a 15- or 30-minute meeting, the potential client will be grateful. Trust me.

• Work on your public speaking skills. Learn how to grab attention with your tone of voice, gesture, posture, and changes in speech tempo;

• Think about where it would be appropriate to tell an anecdote, joke, or just an interesting story that is somehow related to the topic of the meeting; 

• According to Forbes, the audience remembers information 22 times better if it is presented in the format of an interesting story. Use this technique;

• Make sure that your theses and ideas are properly illustrated with videos, slides, infographics, and other similar materials. Forbes claims that the audience of presentations assimilates up to 80% of the information presented in this way. According to a Prezi survey, 62% of viewers would like to see more illustrations in presentations. Try the following scheme: 1 idea or thesis = 1 illustration (Duarte); 

• It’s a good idea to add interactivity to your online presentation. Salescrunch claims that the level of audience engagement when given the opportunity to actively participate in the process of an online event is 92%. This is 14% more than in presentations where viewers are given a passive role. At the same time, 68% of viewers (Prezi) believe that interactive presentations are more memorable.

To conclude this topic, I would like to emphasize once again that all the tips listed above will work better if you have studied your audience well (no matter if it is one person/company or several people/companies) and understand their needs here and now.

Good luck to everyone, good customers, and high incomes!

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Author: Victoria Abed – Chief Revenue Officer at ROI4Presenter