Note: This blog was written by Michelle Martin, Senior Research Analyst at Anova. Michelle works with a number of clients who have made the choice to begin partnering with a third-party win / loss firm for the first time, and shares her thoughts on the benefits that come with that decision
At some point in your life, you have turned to a coach to provide you with objective feedback to help with a sport, a musical interest, a skill, or a career move. For the same reasons you would hire a coach to help you excel in these areas of your life, organizations hire win / loss experts to coach them on how to be more competitive in sales situations. Companies look to the experts because an independent win / loss firm can apply its knowhow to install a consistent feedback loop, eliminate bias, effectively gather feedback, and deliver actionable insights.
INSTALLING A CONSTANT FEEDBACK LOOP
It is common for organizations to ask their salespeople to record a “reason for win/loss” in their CRM when closing out a deal. However, salespeople do not consistently understand why prospects made their decision. Only 19% of sales reps set up separate calls to perform post decision debriefs. This means the vast majority of decision data in a company’s CRM is the sales rep’s interpretation of what happened.
The reason that only 19% set up separate debriefs is because many salespeople quickly move onto their next deal. Salespeople allocate their time to focus on new sales opportunities, as opposed to spending time thinking about deals that have already closed. Unfortunately, this means salespeople do not invest in learning things they did not do well and can improve on, as well as things they did do well and should replicate in the future.
Because companies know that salespeople want to focus on selling the next deal, some organizations “insource” the feedback collection mechanism to another department. If an organization is doing win /loss internally, it is best to have a separate department, such as competitive intelligence or product marketing, run the program. However, there are challenges that come with running a win / loss program internally involving time, expertise, and focus. Keep reading below in the “Effectively Gathering Feedback” section for more detail.
Unlike other companies that are focused on their own product offering, post-decision debriefs are the product of win / loss analysis firms. Win / loss companies need data to operate, and their principal focus is collecting the primary research needed to help their clients. They can allocate resources to focus solely on debriefing with prospects. This makes sure that the feedback is consistently collected and includes specific details that will help organizations sell more effectively. Focusing and devoting so many resources to collecting feedback allows a third-party win / loss firm to help build a consistent feedback loop for their clients.
ELIMINATING BIAS
Let’s say your sales team is made up of reps who are in the 19% of salespeople who conduct a debrief with their prospects. There is still a concern about the accuracy of the feedback the salesperson was able to collect. Based on Anova’s research, salespeople only get the complete truth 40% of the time.
One of the reasons for this low number is because salespeople are not able to get the complete and honest truth from prospects. Prospects sometimes do not feel comfortable delivering bad news to someone who they have built a relationship with. Think about a couple going through a break-up. Does one party always tell the other the exact reasons why they are breaking up with them? Not often. It is more likely they will tell their friends, or even go down the street and tell the bartender the whole story. They just don’t want to hurt the feelings of a person with whom they had a relationship. The same human nature applies to business decisions.
Another reason the number might be low is because salespeople don’t like to admit failure. Anova’s research has discovered salespeople believe they are at fault for losing a deal only 25% percent of the time, but believe they are the primary reason for winning deals 75% of the time. This is because salespeople are only human, and it is human nature to blame failures on external factors but accredit successes to internal factors such as experience, skills, and effort.
So, what does this all mean? If an organization is using data on why they are winning and losing to make decisions, and that data is incorrect, the organization will be making poorly informed decisions and will struggle to improve in the marketplace. On the other hand, an independent third party is in an objective position to receive a prospect’s feedback about the sales process. When speaking to a third-party, prospects are more forthcoming with their true opinions of how a sales team performed and are more likely to share constructive commentary that organizations can use to improve gaps in its offering and sales approach. Third parties will ask all the right questions and remove bias from the debrief stage, and as a result the feedback is more accurate and allows for more confident decision making when the data is aggregated.
EFFECTIVELY GATHERING FEEDBACK
When win / loss is done internally, the job of debriefing with the prospect falls on somebody who lacks the training and experience to effectively probe for details. Without a trained interviewer, an organization will be left with incomplete feedback and there will be holes missing in the data. On the other hand, the specialized interviewers who work for a win / loss company have gone through training to effectively debrief with prospect decision makers and have experience conducting hundreds of interviews. When speaking with a decision maker, it is important for the interviewer to have an engaging, senior-level discussion about the prospect’s buying process.
In addition to the skills needed to conduct a robust interview, there is also a large time commitment required to schedule, conduct, and write up an interview. An average win / loss interview takes around 30-40 minutes. If you factor in the time it takes to schedule and write up the interview, a single interview can require multiple hours of work. For individuals who have other responsibilities, such as salespeople or product marketers, carving out time to do multiple interviews can be a daunting task. However, win / loss firms have trained teams that focus on conducting and analyzing interviews, which increases efficiency.
DELIVERING ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
When it comes time to aggregate results and look at trends and findings, outsourcing win / loss to specialized firms has key advantages compared to running a win / loss program internally. Win / loss firms have proprietary technology, benchmarking, and can deliver stakeholder presentations that will help organizations uncover insights and drive to action.
Win / loss firms often have proprietary technology that includes client dashboards. The dashboard makes it easy for a company to manage their program and view emerging trends in real-time. Having these capabilities readily available on a platform will help organizations keep track of how a program is progressing and what themes are developing as interviews are completed.
Win /loss firms also have the ability to provide benchmarking, which allows organizations to understand how their results fit in a broader context. Say a company does 20 loss interviews and half of them mentioned issues with their sales team as a reason why they were not selected. Is a 50% sales defect rate normal? Is it above average? A win / loss focused firm will be able to answer those questions because it will have the experience of doing several different studies across different clients and industries. Instead of viewing results in a vacuum, a win / loss firm can help an organization understand its data on both an absolute and a relative basis.
Another key advantage win / loss firms have is the ability to deliver findings to an organization’s senior decision makers as a trusted source. Company executives don’t often see all the problems facing their organization because they are not in the room when the sales pitch happened. Win / loss provides executives with visibility into what prospects think about the organization and the presentation of aggregate findings is a great means for pulling out the most salient insights. While some of the commentary will be negative, it is easier to have a third-party deliver this constructive feedback because they are completely independent and do not have a stake in the game. By receiving this unbiased truth, executives can have clarity when making strategic decisions.
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Win / loss will provide your organization with the feedback you need to sell more effectively. In order to unlock as much value as possible from win / loss, companies should rely on an expert third-party organization to help build a consistent feedback loop, gather unbiased feedback, and use their skills to deliver the feedback in the most effective way possible. You’ve hired coaches to help you improve in other aspects of your life, why wouldn’t your organization hire win / loss experts to learn how to compete more successfully?
Consider this: In a survey conducted by BrightTALK, 42% of B2B marketing professionals state that a lack of quality data is their biggest barrier to lead generation. At the same time, 70% of marketing professionals indicate that their biggest marketing goal is converting leads to customers. Anyone see the problem?
Marketers are charged with creating and converting qualified leads but are lacking the quality data in which to do so.
To solve this problem, we need to take a step back. Any successful organization will tell you that product marketing and sales working together is critical. It is, in fact, essential to sourcing prospects, converting those prospects to clients, and retaining existing clients. One cannot have success without the other. It just doesn’t work.
Gathering and using competitive / market intelligence data is one way product marketing and sales can align. Why did one piece of potential business close and another is lost to a competitor? Speaking of competition, what are they doing and saying that perhaps your marketing and sales team don’t know about? What gaps exist in the marketplace that your organization can fill? It is not important enough these days to keep up with the competition; a winning strategy means you stay ahead of them.
Sun Tzu, the author of the famed Art of War, knew this truth even in 500 B.C. in saying, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated.”
Win / loss research helps you with both. Knowing yourself and knowing your competition.
Win / loss reviews are an exercise whereby organizations gather feedback on their sales process and sales team efforts, typically by interviewing new clients and/or prospects after the buying decision has been made, regardless of whether the deal was won or lost. The primary purpose of a win / loss review is to serve as a learning tool – one that is focused on driving continuous improvement.
That learning can come in multiple forms. An individual transcript can help a product marketer or salesperson understand why he or she won or lost a specific opportunity, and aggregate reporting can help organizations better understand overall trends driving decisions and why they are winning or losing across all opportunities. This reporting allows product marketers to know the competition more accurately, make better decisions, and ultimately increase win rates.
Some key elements that help product marketers in win / loss reporting are:
Product marketing begins the customer’s buying process and sales completes it. Win / loss is one way to bring success to that continuum and keep those two teams aligned toward their common goals.
Which company has the better outlook: one whose leaders think they already know everything about their business, competitors and marketplace, or one with a culture rooted in constant learning and improvement? While it’s possible the former may be able to achieve some success, Anova believes the answer for achieving long-term, sustainable growth is with actions and strategies attained from consistently-sought after feedback. In order for a company to embrace the challenges that come with accepting it still has room to grow, it has to have the right mindset.
In her bestselling psychology book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck, Ph.D. introduces two different mindsets – the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. Dweck explains that people with fixed mindsets believe their success and qualities are essentially set in stone. They believe they are born with a certain set of skills, intelligence, and aptitudes. People with a fixed mindset tend not to seek out feedback and typically do not work on themselves because they simply do not believe they can change much. Their world and its trajectory are essentially set at birth.
Contrarily, people with a growth mindset believe their qualities and knowledge are only a starting point and that everything can be developed through learning and continuous improvement. The growth mindset is based on the theory that anything you do can be improved through hard work and effort. People with this mindset tend to have a passion for learning, feedback, and stretching themselves. Their world and its trajectory are continuously growing.
This psychological theory has dramatic implications in the business world. All businesses begin as a collection of people (and their mindsets). Each person on a team brings his or her own mindset to each area of focus. In fact, senior management teams often have a variety of mindsets amongst them. For example, the Head of Marketing may want to perform Win Loss Analysis to better understand buyer preferences and the competitive landscape. They are interested in learning and growing the company’s knowledge with the end result being improved market outcomes. This is the perfect example of a growth mindset. On the other hand, the Head of Sales may believe that he or she knows the answers to these questions already. He or she does not see the value or need in investing in measures to find out why the company is winning and losing. This fixed mindset inhibits their company from gaining valuable feedback.
What seems like a no brainer investment to one person is a waste of energy and resources to another. How does this conflict in mindsets play out?
Some decision makers decide not to collect data on how the company could improve and thus they lower the company’s ability to become self-aware. Ultimately, the company may fall further and further behind a competitor that is willing to get the feedback and learn.
It’s not always the company that starts out the best and fastest that wins the race. But the best companies are ones who create a culture where a growth mindset exists, where opportunities grow, and learning can foster true long term success.
Sales training is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar industry. Between blogs, books, videos, seminars, and individual coaching, there are countless avenues for organizations and individuals to pursue additional training to help them develop sales skills to become more effective at their jobs.
Often times, however, the best examples of how to most effectively sell your product or service comes from within. The star producers on your team have methodologies and tricks that are proven to work. There is no better use case than seeing the solution you are trying to sell yourself be marketed clearly and persuasively.
But there are several reasons why most companies rely on outside consultants or trainers who aren’t responsible for selling themselves to do the coaching. Most notably, the top salespeople in companies need to be out doing what they do best: selling.
It is a resource constraint to try and ask the top producers to also impart their wisdom and tricks of the trade throughout the organization. It is especially difficult to ask those experts to repeatedly carve out time for training others.
Win / loss has many benefits, but among them is the ability to proliferate best practices to all members of a team.
Win / loss isn’t just about personal learning and growth, it is also about helping others learn.
The completed transcript that is written after a post-sale debrief interview contains invaluable context about the deal, strategies used by the sales team, how those tactics were received by the prospect, and any competitive comparisons to rival salespeople. The completed transcript allows the person reading the debrief to learn how and why the rainmaker in your organization was able to reframe the prospect’s business problem in a way that helped them see the value of your solution or articulate the differentiate against other vendors in a tightly contested RFP.
And that completed transcript allows anyone to become a student of the sales team, most notably other salespeople who are looking up to your top performers for tips on how to raise their game.
Think of the power of not only distributing relevant descriptions of your top sales peoples’ performance, in the voice of the customer, to everyone on your team to learn from. Some of Anova’s clients take it a step further, and carve out time on a monthly call or other team meeting, for the actual individual who was praised by the prospect to explain in more detail why they approached a situation the way they did and what tactics they used that were received so well by the customer. In those cases, the ability to combine both voices, the buyer and the seller, to demonstrate best practices is some of the best coaching available.
Win / loss may seem simple: close a deal, call the buyer, find out why they selected you or a competitor. At a high level these steps may seem straightforward, but they are a lot more complicated than what meets the eye.
While debriefing with every single opportunity is a noble objective, it is unrealistic. If you have the right best practices though, you can select the right prospect organizations and the right contacts to engage with, and get on your way to developing a strong feedback mechanism. The following best practices can get you started:
At the Deal / Opportunity Level
There are a multitude of ways to segment or filter your deal-flow by in order to decide which of your prospects to call on. Here are some of the most beneficial to successful win / loss programs:
At the Contact Level
After deciding which deals to focus on, it is critical to make sure you speak with the right person at the prospect organization. Often in complex sales situations there is one key buyer, but many influencers from numerous different departments: the relevant line of business, IT, finance, and of course, procurement.
To gather the best win / loss feedback, remember to not get stuck in procurement. While the procurement department may have influence, they are often limited in the level of detail they can provide when describing the prospect’s full buying criteria and evaluation process. Getting in touch with the ultimate decision maker is the absolute best practice, as they will be able to provide access into their mindset throughout the sales process and ultimate decision.
In some scenarios there are heavy influencers or more than one decision maker, for instance a consultant may have been involved, or both IT and the line of business in a software sale. In these situations, it can be beneficial to interview multiple constituents to obtain the most well-rounded feedback possible.
After identifying who to contact for your interviews, remember some of the best practices for actually having the conversation with them. But by following the best practices above, you’ve already completed half the battle of conducting a win / loss interview.
It is natural to want to learn from failures or lost sales situations. Companies spend a lot of time and effort training, preparing, and selling their products and services in competitive environments. When a deal is lost, it makes great sense to want to learn why. In fact, we see this all the time in new sales conversations with our own prospects at Anova. Nine out of ten times when we ask companies interested in win / loss what they are trying to get out of a research program, at least one of the organization’s objectives is to learn from their losses.
But what about the wins? Are there valuable teachings beyond knowing why you won?
Absolutely. In fact, recent Anova research revealed that 36% of win situations experience a post-sale issue. Put another way, even though the decision was a win, just over one-third of new clients have an experience that jeopardizes the long-term relationship.
These relationships begin on fragile terms and need help sooner rather than later. Do any of these common post-sales issues sound familiar?
Think of client relationships that may have encountered any of the above problems. It becomes incredibly difficult for organizations to then turn the customer into a satisfied, loyal, referenceable client after a post-sale issue. When the cost of obtaining a new customer is estimated to be 7x as high as retaining an existing one, and after the sales team has just recently undergone the effort to win the deal, it pays to make sure the relationship starts off on the right foot.
Instead, as Anova’s research shows, sales teams are often guilty of closing the deal, tallying the win, and moving on. However, that transition between prospect and client is paramount and all too often can make or break the overall success of that client engagement.
The ability to uncover which clients may be starting off a relationship on rocky grounds, and what issues may be plaguing them, are why collecting win data is so important for successful organizations. Learning from winning sales situations provides organizations with valuable insights into new client relationships and can play a critical part of the new client’s onboarding process, providing information such as:
Just because a deal is won does not mean it will be a win forever. Organizations need to have a tool available to them to ensure the transition from prospect to client is handled with the care any long-term relationship deserves.
Think of a win transcript as a point-in-time client satisfaction measure. Is the client starting off on the right foot with the organization or are there already issues and missed expectations that need attention? We can’t forget that in most wins, there was a runner-up that is one email or call away.
Here we are. It’s fourth quarter and your sales goals mean everything right now. It’s go time. Are you wishing this task was easier?
You’re not alone. Recently Salesforce published an eye-opening statistic: 57% of sales reps missed their sales quotas last year. What a huge impact falling short has on salespeople, sales teams, and entire organizations. Jim Rohn, one of America’s most regarded entrepreneurs and motivational authors, offered a different perspective on the problem when he said, “Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.”
The truth is sales is hard. It is not easy to find a prospect, establish rapport, understanding your prospects business and needs, and then pitch your solution against your top competitors. Many people just reading that narrative would walk away. But salespeople are called to the challenge and the best salespeople and best sales organizations want to get better and better at selling. They just need the means in order to do so.
Win / loss analysis will help you sell better. Consider a case study of one of Anova’s clients which demonstrates how a sales team reached its goals by learning what they needed to improve:
Anova’s client was a large, institutional financial service provider, but was experiencing a declining sales win rate. The firm was receiving informal feedback that it was losing in new business situations because its sales efforts were lacking compared to those of its primary competitors. Senior management wanted to establish the legitimacy of this feedback and understand the true depth and contour of any associated sales process problems so it could make the necessary adjustments.
The company utilized Anova’s Win / Loss Analysis program to re-vamp its sales training and to re-engineer its approach to sales presentations. The interview transcripts were used as an ongoing feedback mechanism and coaching tool for sales personnel. Additionally, the company changed how it structured and prepared presentation content by formalizing an internal review process, which included “dry runs” with senior executives, who offered critiques and advice to the company’s sales staff on presentation style, flow and how to respond to tough questions by prospects. Competitive intelligence gained from the program helped the company train its sales force on how to position, package and promote the firm’s capabilities and value proposition against top competitors. Within two years, the frequency with which the company’s sales team and sales approach were identified as a major factor in lost business fell by more than 30 percent.
As the Salesforce studies indicates, too many sales teams are falling short of their ultimate goal. In order to better enable them to hit their targets, organizations should be providing them with the invaluable feedback and coaching made possible by capturing the voice of the prospect in post-decision debriefs.
Win Loss Analysis will not make selling easier, but it will make you better at selling.
Win Loss 2020
This year, people and businesses had to find ways to navigate a crisis of tremendous scope and size. B2B businesses had to make rapid changes to their workplaces and processes to adjust to this new environment. Similar to other initiatives, win / loss programs also require careful oversight to succeed during this unconventional time.
Considering the unprecedented nature of the current crisis, making the right decisions for your win / loss program this year can be a daunting task. This blog is intended to help guide you in considering the impact of current circumstances on your win / loss program, and provide best practices you can utilize to ensure your program provides value for your organization during this time.
Considering the Impact of COVID on Win / Loss Programs
First and foremost, your business should determine if a win / loss program is possible given the current circumstances. As win / loss is closely tied to sales, the volume of deal flow in your company’s pipeline will be a primary factor in making this decision. If significantly fewer deals than normal are making their way through the pipeline, it stands to reason that your company should scale back or even pause the win / loss program as there are fewer opportunities to gather data and act on the program’s findings.
However, you should weigh this consideration against the increased relative importance of each deal. If deal flow has slowed down over the last few months, it is now more important to win the sales engagements that are up for grabs and gathering feedback on the deals that do exist is even more important.
While most industries have felt a negative impact on sales during this time, perhaps your company may be in one of the markets such as eCommerce, telehealth, or cloud services that are experiencing a spike in new business activity. In this case, it would also make sense to scale up your program accordingly.
If you decide that your company stands to benefit from win / loss during this time, you should also consider how your company’s internal resources may affect the program. Many companies have needed to adjust responsibilities for employees, sometimes in conjunction with staff reductions, and the change in workloads could affect your company’s ability to execute a successful win / loss program and drive meaningful changes.
Win / loss programs can take a considerable amount of coordination, particularly if conducted in-house. Does your company or department have the resources to carry out interviews for a win / loss program? Once interviews are completed, does your company have the bandwidth to analyze and act on the program’s findings? Even the best-executed win / loss program will have a severely limited impact if the company cannot act on the findings, and so you want to make sure if you are going to run your program you can devote the appropriate resources to making sure it drives value to your business. Otherwise it is not worth operating.
After looking within your company to determine how the current crisis may affect your win / loss program, you should consider how your company’s clients and former prospects have been impacted. The companies that you are asking for feedback may be experiencing the effects of the current crisis in different ways than you are, depending on their industries and locations. Are your potential contacts primarily in hard-hit industries such as healthcare or transportation, or are they in markets such as SaaS that have less dramatic changes? Will your program seek feedback from contacts in regions currently feeling the full force of the virus, or are your contacts in areas that have largely recovered or fended off the pandemic? If your potential contacts are in regions and industries hit particularly hard by the present crisis, it may be best to scale back or even pause your program until the situation changes. Assuming that your potential contacts are not exclusively in the most impacted regions and markets, running a successful win / loss program with a solid response rate is still achievable.
As companies have adapted to the new realities of everyday work, contacts have become more likely to respond to outreach and participate in win / loss studies. Anova saw a 280% increase in the number of interviews completed from May to June, showcasing that interviews can be completed when research programs are operated in a mindful way.
Adjusting the Goals of your Win / Loss Program
If you decide that moving forward with win / loss is the best path for your company at this time, you should then consider how the current circumstances will affect the goals for your program.
One of the main adjustments that companies needed to make over the last few months was a change towards entirely virtual sales presentations. Although this rapid shift happened to sales teams across industries, only 37% of organizations provided training or best practices regarding virtual selling. Gathering and analyzing win / loss data from these recent months can help determine how well your sales teams have handled this change and if your organization should invest in new training. Additionally, win / loss analysis can help uncover competitive insights such as understanding if competitors are using any tactics or tools to make successful online presentations. Designing your interview guides and surveys to answer these types of questions can help ensure your organization makes informed decisions to stay competitive moving forward.
Another consideration is how buyer priorities have changed since the start of the year. Because organizations now face greater uncertainty about their financial futures, companies now must scrutinize every dollar spent. In the world of sales, this means it has become much more important to demonstrate value and ROI to prospects in a concrete way. This also means that your sales teams are potentially selling into different types of contacts, such as CFOs and finance personnel at your prospect organizations. Has your sales team adequately demonstrated the ROI of your offering to these new types of contacts? Does your organization need to adjust its sales messaging to account for these changes? These types of questions should be kept in mind as your company conducts interviews and analyzes results from 2020 sales engagements.
Best Practices for Win / Loss During this Time
If and when your organization decides to move forward with win / loss, you should take the proper steps to ensure your program becomes a success. One of the most important priorities for your program should be to emphasize empathy with your outreach to contacts this year. According to Anova research about how businesses are adapting to the coronavirus pandemic, 84% of companies adjusted their communications to lead with more empathy than before. This can be particularly important in reaching out to win / loss contacts because you are asking these contacts to lend you their time and energy during a period when both are likely stretched thin. With that in mind, try to be accommodating when reaching out to contacts. Offer shorter phone conversations if they have little time or ask if they would like your organization to reach out again in a few months. These types of accommodations are relatively easy adjustments and can demonstrate that your organization values the contact’s time and feedback.
In addition to adjusting outreach, consider adjusting your surveys and questionnaires to address the current crisis. How are your company’s prospects and clients dealing with the uncertainty of this year? Do these organizations and contacts require more assistance from your company during this time? Asking these types of questions while leading with empathy can show that your organization recognizes the reality of the situation and does not seem tone deaf.
However, if may not be necessary to change your interview guide if feedback is gathered by experienced interviewers over the phone. Conversations over the phone can allow the interviewer to properly contextualize questions, address concerns, and probe for additional information on the fly, meaning that concrete changes to your interview questions may not be necessary. On the other hand, online surveys do not have this same level of flexibility, and therefore could require significant changes to properly address the current climate.
Carrying out a win / loss program during a time of high uncertainty is an intimidating task, especially without a game plan for how to address the needs of the present. However, by taking into account the effects of the crisis on your organization and your potential contacts, you can make the best decisions regarding your win / loss program and put your organization’s program in the best position to succeed.
As the business world grapples with COVID-19, the increase in video conferencing for internal as well as external meetings is trending. Microsoft Teams, just one of the many video conferencing platforms available to businesses, revealed a 200% increase in the number of meeting minutes logged on the application from mid-March to early April. Other platforms like Zoom and WebEx also saw drastic increases in usage with employees unable to go into the office, much less travel to see clients and prospects.
So, what does that mean for salespeople used to sitting across the table from their buyers? It means they will have to adapt to make sure their skills and behaviors translate to the virtual selling world, and that the dreaded, yet all-to-common, technical snafu does not occur when they are talking to their prospects.
To help, Anova has compiled a list of best practices, ranging from technical to behavioral, for sales teams adapting to the world of virtual selling:
Practice and Record Your Practice
Just as you would before going into an in-person meeting, practice your main speaking points and take extra care to rehearse the hand-offs from one speaker to another. This is especially important when you and your co-presenter are not in the same room together (and that pesky mute button always seems to get in the way – see below). When you are practicing, try and record the session so you can come back later to watch the recording. You will be amazed at the little things you pick up that you can improve on watching yourself present.
Use the Video Feature
It’s called video conferencing for a reason! It is important to make a connection with your counterparts on the call and to be able to read each other’s body language. This enables you to respond to facial expressions and pick up more intelligence than just over the phone (Is the person you are talking with engaged and looking at the screen, or is he looking off-screen? Are they nodding and smiling or seem puzzled?). Make sure each member on the call has the video on so it feels like you are all together.
Act the Part
Seeing if people are engaged or not goes both ways, so behave as though you were at the meeting in-person. Turn off all outside distractions / devices and focus on the presentation. It will be very apparent if you are looking bored, tweeting, or otherwise not engaged. It also helps to blur your background if you have distractions that may be behind you (e.g. a door for housemates to walk through, a messy room).
Look the Part
Even though you are in the comfort of your home, take extra care to come across as professional:
Look into the Camera
Look directly at the camera. It may be natural to gaze downward at your own reflection when talking but try to sit back and look directly at the camera as much as you can. To the person watching you, that will come across more like direct eye contact and help you build more of a connection, instead of having them feel like they are talking to the crown of someone’s head or to someone who is constantly looking down.
Test the Audio
Most systems give you the option of using the computer for audio or dialing in using a separate phone. Many people prefer to just use their computer audio, however there are a few downsides to be aware of. Depending on the system and computer you are using, sometimes the microphone can be static-y. Additionally, if for some reason your home Wi-Fi decides to act up and the video freezes, if you are dialed in on your phone you will at least stay connected to the call as opposed to dropping all together. Still, using your phone can result in a delay from what you are saying and what you are showing on the screen. Weigh your options and decide which is the best choice for your call, and if using the computer audio, log into the meeting a few minutes early and make sure your teammates can see and hear you clearly with no delay.
Be Aware of Background Noise
Background noise can come in many forms – dogs barking, children (or adults) yelling, keys typing, or papers rustling. Try to control these as much as you can, such as scheduling calls for when you know is a typically quiet time of day, or if you are using multiple notepads, putting a towel down underneath everything to reduce the sound of all of the papers on your desk. When all else fails, or you are taking notes on your keyboard, be quick to use the mute button. Just be sure (as we see below) to turn it off when it comes time to speak again!
Handle the Mute Button
If there is feedback on the call or you are worried about background noise, politely ask attendees to go on mute if they are not speaking. Give everyone a gentle reminder to make sure they unmute themselves before beginning to talk. Also, it never hurts to hit the mute button and take a second to make sure it turned off before beginning to speak.
Here we are together in a new reality. Now is a time more than ever where we will need to lean on each other. Anova has proudly been helping companies connect thoughtfully and strategically with their prospects, clients, and internal teams for over 16 years now, and in these trying times I and all my teammates at Anova want the readers of this letter to know: we’ve got your back.
Here’s how:
The Real-time Value of Prospect and Client Feedback Research
Anova is here for you. Just in the last few days Anova has had companies reach out to us expressing an increased need to have strategic touchpoints with their own customers. Now, more than ever, win / loss and client satisfaction research are critically valuable for B2B companies.
Anova is Your Expert
We are experts. Across the market research industry, specifically win / loss providers, the most fundamental differentiator is the quality of a company’s output and service. Companies need to choose a research partner they can rely on to provide them with the best results, and with the ever-changing environment, Anova is best equipped to rise to the occasion:
We care. A lot. All of us are in this together and I truly believe each of us has a role to play in helping to overcome these obstacles that are facing us. You can rely on Anova to do our part and be the best partners possible for your organization. We can all survive and thrive together.
Best wishes,
President, Anova Consulting Group
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