If you ask me, there’s no such thing as a simple sales meeting. Because getting someone to book a meeting with you is hard work.
First, you’ve got to win their attention and show them how you can help them solve whatever challenge they’re facing. Then you go back and forth and back and forth until you finally find a time that works for both you and their whole team. And once the meeting is set, you have to make sure they actually show up…which is a whole other ball game.
You see what I’m getting at here, right? There’s an insane amount of friction you run up against when you’re trying to book even a “simple” meeting.
That’s why our team launched Drift Meetings. To make sure you:
- Automatically qualify and book meetings with site visitors 24/7
- Never miss a VIP buyer when they visit your website again
- Don’t make buyers wait – book meetings instantly
But that’s not all. To celebrate the power of conversations (and the 500,000+ sales meetings our customers have already booked with Drift Meetings), we decided to create our own holiday ?
Yes, you heard it here first, folks. I hereby declare Wednesday, October 16th, 2019 to be the first-annual National Sales Meetings Day – a day to celebrate conversations.
To help kick off the celebration in style, I popped over to the sales side of the office to ask the team how Drift Meetings removes friction from conversations with customers, prospects, and partners. Here’s what I learned ?
1) Putting an end to the back and forth
Before Drift Meetings, I did a lot of back and forth on the phone and over email – just for me to be able to set up a time for a conversation. Not even to qualify, just to have a conversation. That alone was so time-consuming when I could have spent that time adding value to other prospects.
2) Breaking through the noise
The people I sell to get hundreds of emails a day. When I’m writing emails to them, I have to focus on every detail to break through the noise – so I make sure the subject line is attention-grabbing, that my message is the right length, and that the Drift Video I’m sending is personalized. And since I’m spending so much time on creating a custom message, the last thing I want to do is have an inconvenient way for them to schedule with me. Cue the calendar drop from Drift Meetings.
3) Saying goodbye to calendar mania
When you introduce multiple calendars into the sales process, that’s where things can get off track. You’ll have the first conversation and then the prospect wants to bring in three more teammates into the next call. But then it’s a mess to pull everyone into the meeting. As the salesperson, you have to go back and forth trying to schedule a follow-up meeting after the demo. We see deals die – even after the prospect was super excited after the demo – because calendars just get too crazy. Drift Group Meetings have saved us from this common scenario.
4) Building up your champion
Anytime you’re in a complex sale, controlling your messaging outside the initial demo is so important. In order to get the champion to pitch internally in a successful way, the best thing you can do is help them save time and improve their internal proposal. Because they’re on the line as well, and everyone has a budget to manage. So I often help by putting together executive review packages, recording custom pre-recorded video presentations, and offering to block off times to be available when they have internal meetings in case I need to hop on.
5) Getting on the same page
As a buyer, the thing I hate the most is getting calls from someone whose sole job is to assess whether I am worth someone else’s’ time or not. It makes me wonder if the process is actually worth my time or not. That’s the value-add for me when it comes to the Drift Bot, it handles the qualification, so by the time you get someone on the phone, everyone is on the same page.
6) Engaging in real-time
Imagine you finally get someone on the hook, they’re engaging with that email you sent, and now you have to go back and forth to find the right time for them, and their team. It’s a tough process. But now I’m able to use Drift Video because it creates a powerful interaction immediately for the buyer. And even beyond the buyer’s experience, as a rep I get notified that they’re watching my video, we can chat right then and there, and I can seamlessly drop my calendar to book a time.
7) Prioritizing the most important chats
If Drift wasn’t able to organize and prioritize chats for me, I wouldn’t be able to spend time on the 60 or so chats a day that really need my focus. This way I’m not inundated with 1,000+ from everyone else chatting in.
