Business has almost always been about the numbers: the bottom line, metrics, and data. Yet when it comes time to actually talk about or share those numbers, unless you’re in the same room as your audience, the task can be difficult with traditional communication tools.
Video conferencing allows you to engage meeting participants on the cold, hard numbers, with those in the room with you and those at their computers miles, if not hundreds of miles away. Screen sharing software can power interactive presentations and allow the sharing of real-time data in a meeting environment that is far more efficient than a phone call or email chain.
This advantage is especially valuable when speaking with customers, both potential and existing. Being able to share ROI data in real-time with a prospective client could help make a favorable impression.
Here’s what to know about how video conferencing can support real-time data sharing with customers.
Video conferencing is a big upgrade from voice-only
Any professional who has tried communicating numbers over the phone knows the challenges of doing so — and that’s doubly true when trying to command the attention of 10 other meeting participants. In voice-only environments, call leaders have no real way to prevent multitasking or ensuring their point is fully understood.
Video conferencing solves these common problems by providing a format that facilitates more natural conversations, while also holding meeting participants accountable when it comes to paying attention. Making eye contact with attendees can help reinforce a particular data point and eliminate multitasking concerns.
You want your client’s full attention, but with voice-only, it’s difficult to see if you have it. With video conferencing, your sales reps and customer success teams never have to guess.
Screen sharing improves real-time coordination
Talking about numbers entails referencing them in some way: To grasp the data, one likely has to be able to see it. This can present logistical headaches like ensuring people are paying attention, making sure people have the presentation in front of them, and further, making sure they are on the right page of the presentation that the presenter is walking through. Major points can easily be missed.
Screen sharing removes the hurdles to getting you and your customers on the same page. It’s as easy as casting your screen to the rest of the meeting participants when conducting a quarterly report or presenting a brief for the first time. This ensures that everyone is looking at the same data, as well as able to see the presentation from the start.
Video gives life to numbers
Numbers aren’t the easiest subject matter to engage meeting participants on — at least through voice-only calls. With screen sharing and video conferencing, your teams have all sorts of creative capability to ensure those numbers come to life in real-time and make an impression on the customer.
Suppose your marketing team designs a top-of-the-funnel sales deck so that positive ROI numbers are revealed through an animation. Running the presentation through a screen share means everyone experiences the effect at the same time on the pitch call, ensuring resources and opportunities aren’t wasted.
Screen sharing enables a deep dive into data
With voice-only conference calls, you only have so much time to talk about numbers before the attention span of the meeting as the whole slips away; that, or attendees are attentive yet disengaged. This can complicate meeting agendas if you’re diving through complex or extensive data sets with your client. There’s a limit to the specificity you can get into over the phone while still guaranteeing comprehension and engagement on the part of others.
That restrictive threshold doesn’t apply in the same way to video conferencing. When everyone is looking face-to-face, meeting participants can actually get involved in an earnest, sustained discussion.
Customers can get involved as meeting presenter
When presenting numbers to a customer, engagement is important at a functional level, which means making it possible for them to comment on or examine the data in deeper detail and with the attention on them. That’s difficult to do with voice-only, but in an online meeting, you can pass presenter roles to the customer so that they can share their screen, themselves.
When it takes a few minutes of back and forth to get to the right page of the presentation the client wants, it can negatively impact the meeting experience. When the customer has the presenter controls, however, they can effortlessly navigate to specific data points they want to talk about or ask questions on.
Sharing real-time data with customers is a modern necessity to doing business that traditional communication tools can’t handle. Voice-only calls can limit the effectiveness of your sales, marketing, and customer success teams. With the right screen sharing software, meetings can be elevated to the next level.
Looking for a solution to drive this performance and value? Cisco Webex has a reliable screen sharing solution to facilitate better meetings.
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