How to Improve Remote Sales With Virtual Customer Meetings

Virtual customer meetings can shorten the sales cycle and help close prospects faster. Ravi Chalaka, chief marketing officer and VP of product marketing at Jifflenow, discusses how creative marketers can drive more wins out of the sales pipeline by converting MQLs (marketing qualified leads) into MQMs (marketing-qualified meetings) with B2B meeting management platforms. 

In response to the constraints imposed on them by the COVID-19 pandemic, CMOs have reallocated what they had budgeted for in-person live events, conferences, trade shows. They are instead looking to digital marketing as well as lead-development activities that were formerly bit players in the overall marketing mix, such as virtual events and webinars have become very popular. 

These are of course fantastic tools for engaging with our prospects, but they are missing that essential element of prospect engagement: meetings that convene qualified prospects and key internal sales, executives, and expert resources. Often, these face-to-face meetings were scheduled at or around the major in-person events—events that were all scratched a few months ago, to the detriment of sales pipelines.

Customer meetings are a deciding factor in growing the B2B sales pipeline, which is the leading indicator for revenue. A complex enterprise sale involves moving prospects from awareness and thorough consideration, education and decision phases. For B2B markets, the last three phases of this process will generate better results when the focus shifts to customer meetings, product demos, proof-of-concept presentations, and so on. Today, though, those important face-to-face customer meetings are impossible. It is however proven that a customer meeting, whether it is in-person or virtual, is an essential element for advancing sales.

How do we factor these customer meetings into our virtual-led digital marketing strategy? First, let’s add a new KPI to our demand generation dashboard by extending the concept of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) so that we focus on converting MQLs into MQMs (marketing-qualified meetings).

MQMs typically involves several participants who are key in advancing the discussion toward a sale and may include a product demo with an expert, executives for a roundtable discussion with partners and distributors, matchmaking sessions at virtual events, ‘meet the expert’ technical or industry advisories, or partner meetings that convene the specialists needed to close a sale. The more of these virtual customer meetings that you can engineer, the more your marketing activities will contribute to your business’ sales pipeline and boost revenue.

Learn More: 5 Things That Are Making Your Virtual Meetings Ineffective

It’s time to Enhance your Marketing Programs with MQMs

As marketers focused on demand generation, we’ve become adept at building mechanisms to qualify a lead by providing links to download collateral or a white paper. But as they move from initial awareness to consideration and evaluation, prospects are actively seeking information about the product or service from experts. To help these highly motivated and qualified prospects, we need to give them the opportunity to request a meeting, rather than wait for sales development reps to perform outreach from among thousands of leads to set up meetings.

Let’s start with the classic demand-generation programs: how might we go beyond the classic call-to-action that’s embedded in our website, email marketing programs, social media platforms, and chatbots? Marketers can make it easy for prospects to engage by integrating MQM requests into these programs in the form of a simple “Book a Meeting” or “Meet the Expert” link that automates the scheduling of virtual customer meetings Opens a new window (sets in motion an approval process, depending on your organizational needs). From here, you can drive a wide range of engagements to enhance your campaign with product demos, expert meetings, sales meetings, partner meetings, and even executive meetings for top accounts.

Another marketing program that’s MQM-ready is webinars, which have emerged as a popular education vehicle for marketers as they reallocate their events budget. Webinars are easy to design and market and can attract highly qualified attendees. But as virtual, one-to-many engagement, you may miss the opportunity to move qualified webinar attendees to the next phase of engagement with the sales team or product experts. 

Traditionally, once the webinar ends, marketers may send a link to the presentation and ask a few questions about how the attendee rated the webinar. We drive more follow-on one-to-one engagement here by making it easy for an attendee to request an MQM—for example by including a mechanism to set up a meeting with the speaker, an executive, or a product expert.

Qualified, motivated prospects are eager to learn more about how your product or service will address their needs, especially for complex B2B markets with longer sales cycles. In response, many companies have implemented year-round ‘Meet the Expert’ programs to provide detailed information about their products or services through virtual meetings. One successful approach in this use case is to define a pool of experts and then manage these meetings by region, topic, or product. Again, we’re finding ways to use MQMs as engagement ‘moments’ with prospects as they move through the buyer journey.

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Leverage your Existing Marketing Tech Stack 

A successful MQM-centered program will generate a high volume of meeting requests, each of which must be managed and tracked for effectiveness and follow up. If handled manually, setting up each of these could require as many as 14 calls and emails, which is clearly a cumbersome process. 

To offload customer meeting management for hundreds of meetings from your valuable sales resources, a meeting automation platform (MAP) is a smart addition to your marketing tech stack. Over 60 Fortune 1000 companies have adopted it and have more than doubled their customer meetings attributed to marketing campaigns.

A MAP significantly scales up your MQM capabilities by automating three manually intensive and error-prone tasks:

1. Pre-meeting scheduling (orchestrating the meeting set up for attendees; ensuring each has the opportunity information needed to make the meeting successful) 
2. Workflow management (providing oversight over all meeting requests and confirmations; ensuring relevant meeting information is captured; managing meeting logistics) 
3. Post-meeting analytics (generation of metrics dashboards; management of surveys to understand performance and buyer intent).

To streamline data sharing and meeting scheduling, management and reporting, a MAP interfaces with your existing marketing, sales enablement, and event software platforms such as CRM systems, marketing automation, video conferencing applications, virtual event software, event registration systems, badge scanners, and of course calendaring software.

Think about how you might add MQMs across your multichannel digital marketing programs, both globally and regionally. By increasing the number of virtual customer meetingsOpens a new window you will shorten your sales cycle and drive more solid wins out of your sales pipeline. A MAP can easily support in-person meetings as well when they are back on our calendars in the post-COVID world.

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