What percentage of your sales calls today are virtual meetings vs. face-to-face meetings?

Hooray for Barbara Giamanco! “I actually talk to more people on the phone than even in person.” So do I!

Indeed, no one has tossed their phones and they will actually use their phones to communicate! Of course, our dialogue has to be distinctive in a favorable way … dialogues not depositions or pitches. When we do, phone calls often are welcome and the resulting conversations fun and effective.

Sidebar: some years ago, a Dallas prospect asked me to come up from Austin and conduct our sales meeting in person. I replied, “Gerald, we’ll be talking about producing and running Business To Business By Phone® training for your company. If you and I can’t do that by phone ourselves, we need to get out of the business!” Gerald agreed. We closed the deal right then and there, by phone.

Michael, many of mine are virtual given that I work with clients in other continents. Compared to even a year ago, virtual is totally cool and with online collaboration tools actually far more productive.

I agree with Linda that there are so many good platforms now to connect with prospects and clients - they have really come a long way. Now we use one tool that has split screen video and can make an audio recording, or we can do online meetings with PPT and other documents using a different platform.

There seems to be something for everyone now, and it is much more widely accepted, which we did not find even a year ago.

The idea of a blended approach for more complex sales is working well.

100% of my sales calls are virtual meetings via iMeet. My inside sales team also runs 100% of their meetings via our collaboration software. We like to consider ourselves a virtual outside sales team.

We deal with B2B complex sales so virtual vs face to face is about 50/50. I agree with Linda, the virtual capabilities have really grown over the past few years. Technology is great! Just imagine where we'll be in 10 years.

Technology has a habit of making our personal interactions less intimate, less meaningful, more uniform. The volumes of people we can connect with now via email, Twitter, other social networks is great at scale, but superficial in creating the kind of bonds and relationships that have historically driven preference and decisions in the business world.

And despite the proliferation of electronic networking channels, we still make decisions based on decidedly offline and personal criteria. We prefer to do business with people we like, people we trust. And although relationships can be fostered and extended via online means, they are created and converted most typically in far more traditional fashion.

So it’s interesting to me that we see so many new technologies being built to help us better tap into and “reconnect” with the deeply personal and offline nature of relationship-building and sales acceleration.

LinkedIn can only go so far. It fails to effectively differentiate a strong connection from a weak one. It doesn’t say anything about offline bonds, family and social connections, let alone relationships that haven’t been proactively entered and documented in the channel.

New technologies such as IntroRocket are working hard to better approximate and identify where the true offline leverage and relationship-building can happen. By looking at a combination of LinkedIn, Facebook, email habits and more, IntroRocket is able to paint a far more accurate picture of where the most valuable relationships lie.

It’s still incomplete, but getting closer. And it’s interesting to me that what we’re using technology to try and reach, is what our parents and past generations did so well without any of this.

Five hours on the golf course may be inefficient. It may not scale. But it worked then, and it works now.

Relationships, as well as sales, are personal. We can use technology to more effectively identify and leverage opportunities, but consummation will always be more about what’s happening in our hearts and minds.

100% Online, in my case. With the economy facing one of the worst depressions, sales/marketing budgets are under sever pressure. It is always interesting to interact with customers and prospects online. And my experience has been quite positive.