Marketers live and die by many adages and catchphrases. Today we’d like to look at two and see how they relate to live video chat software.

“Seeing is Believing”

The first is “seeing is believing.” Now, it’s very rare that a customer buys a product without seeing it. (For those of us who have tried to buy shoes online – we found out the hard way.) Your prospects are no different. That’s why you fly your sales team all over the world to give prospects a proverbial “test-drive” of your product.

Our argument is this: depending on the product a company is selling and the complexity of that product, odds are that many conversions are slipping through the cracks under the current marketing model. Let’s say your firm sells customer relationship management software for small clients, like, say, a doctor’s office. You can’t send your sales team to every prospect, so you rely on the classic approach of the telephone call. And, ascribing to the “seeing is believing” mantra, your sales team walks a prospect through the software over the phone.

It can be a clumsy exercise, especially if the prospect isn’t entirely “technologically advanced.” (e.g. “See that button the right? Click there – no…the one below that…click there.”) Realizing this approach is somewhat fruitless, the company may opt for online Web meetings where the marketer and the prospect view the same screen and the marketer “drives” the conversation. This is, no doubt, and improvement, but there are two main glaring omissions: the rapport between the salesperson and the prospect and spontaneous interactions.

The single greatest determining element of the sales interaction – the rapport between the salesperson and the prospect – is non-existent. Well, it’s not entirely non-existent. The sales person can build a rapport with the prospect over the phone, but that’s precisely our point: it’s a weak rapport that fails to fully leverage the benefit of face-to-face contact. Which bring us back to our first catchphrase: sure, seeing is believing in terms of how a product performs during a sales call, but it also applies to the human interactions that underlie that exercise. And with live customer service software that employs video chat, that critical interaction is front-and-center. Perhaps it’s no surprise, therefore, that according to an eMarketer survey, 63 percent of respondents said they were more likely to return to a website with live video chat.

Now let’s discuss spontaneous interactions. The scenario above is one that is more easy to manage. The salesperson communicates with the prospect, they could schedule a call, set up a web meeting etc. What about the great majority of prospect-to-online-business interactions? These are usually spontaneous, without exchanging details or scheduling a call and without having to install any software or plugins (which is usually the case with popular web meeting tools). In this case the live customer service software need to allow the prospect to contact the salesperson in real-time, video chat with them and perhaps see shared screen or content, without installing any software or scheduling time to speak in advance.

“Things rarely go to plan”

This brings us to our second mantra in the marketing world: things rarely go according to plan. That is, your best marketer can have an ironclad strategy prior to the call, but even the best of intentions can be thwarted by the unknown. Let’s say the marketer is in a face-to-face meeting with a prospect. The prospect goes “off-script” and asks the marketer a question or for a piece of information that the market doesn’t have handy. The marketer says, “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” and while it may not sabotage the sale, he or she may come across as unprepared.

In a live video setting, where content can also be shared in real-time, the marketer can pull up the information and share it with the prospect. Even if the prospect has to wait for a minute, the connection and the relationship are still there.

This is just one minor example of how live video chat software combined with content sharing is a step above the current approach. Look out for more posts on utilizing this great technology to your benefit!