Why screen sharing works better for sales than traditional conference calls

Make screen sharing work for sales

Sales meetings need to be well-oiled machines. Any hitch in the process can negatively impact the experience for prospective clients. With the traditional conference call, there’s a lot of risk that something could go wrong, whether meeting participants talk over one another or lack technical coordination.

Such meeting formats can derail the sales process quickly, yet many businesses still depend on traditional conference calls when customer expectations increasingly demand clear presentations and engaging experiences.

Bad meetings waste opportunities

Not only is such inefficiency harmful to the sales cycle, it comes with several costs. Sales follow-up statistics show that, on average, it takes eight follow-up calls to reach a prospect. If your salespeople are calling this many times to get a meeting, and then not using the meeting time they get efficiently, these meetings become costly. According to a report from Swiss online scheduler Doodle, the economic costs of poorly organized meetings in the U.S. reached nearly $400 billion in 2019. A less-than-satisfactory experience may lead to lost revenue opportunities, wasted time, and other costs.

A solution to the organized chaos of traditional sales conference calls is screen sharing. With the help of screen sharing software, sales teams can more effectively engage prospects over the phone and through shared on-screen materials.

Let’s look at some of the reasons why screen sharing works better than traditional sales conference calls.

Screen sharing facilitates efficient meetings

Disorganization is too often the natural state of conference calls without the aid of screen sharing software. Just think about how disjointed personal introductions can be when each new meeting participants dials in and there’s no certainty as to who is actually on the line. At a basic level, screen sharing works to provide this visibility into call attendance with a meeting room dashboard. Practically, this helps sales reps maintain better control so everything runs according to plan.

Coordination in online meetings is significantly improved through screen sharing when it comes time to look at a presentation deck or other piece of collateral. At this point, traditional calls pause as everyone shuffles through papers or frantically searches an inbox for an attachment they never actually ended up receiving, so then more time is spent forwarding a simple one-pager. Ten minutes later the sales playbook is out the window.

With screen sharing, sales reps can instantly cast their screen to others in the meeting room, ensuring they have access to the document that’s currently being discussed. This also ensures that participants can follow in real time, eliminating the disruption posed by questions like “What page are we on?”

Screen sharing improves communication with visuals

Your teams puts a lot of time into creating and personalizing sales presentations; screen sharing ensures that those efforts don’t go to waste. Everyone in the screen sharing session can view documents together. Multimedia can help add dynamism to a sales presentation, and there’s no way to guarantee on a traditional call that everyone is following along at the same rate.

Visual learning is important to overall communication, but especially for sales. Graphical elements presented through screen sharing can help illustrate numbers that lack life on a traditional sales call, as well as reinforce benefits and convey brand identity.

With screen sharing, you can integrate video seamlessly into a presentation without worrying about it crashing for other participants. You could even exit the presentation and easily pull up a YouTube video and have it stream to the entire audience. The power of visuals can truly be harnessed this way.

Screen sharing allows participants to go mobile

Sales reps and prospects are busy people, often on the go and traveling. That can make it hard if someone has to take a call while waiting at the airport gate or otherwise in transit and away from their work set-up. Screen sharing software tackles this potential problem by allowing them to call through a mobile app and view presentation materials through their personal mobile device or laptop.

This level of support is important for remote workforces, which are becoming the standard for many companies, rather than the exception. Enabling a sales staff to sell while on the road is crucial to seizing opportunities.

Screen sharing enhances the experience

Screen sharing and video conferencing make it feel like you’re in the same physical room as other participants (without the cost of plane tickets and hotel bills). In the sales process, fostering this type of close relationship is important to winning over leads, as well as maintaining existing accounts. You can put faces to names, which builds familiarity — and thus trust — with customers.

Not only does screen sharing improve coordination, but also collaboration. Sales people can pass presenter authority to other participants on the call. They could also deviate from the presentation to try to find answers to a question.

There are countless pitfalls to the traditional sales call, and sales teams needn’t try to continually dodge them. With screen sharing software, sales calls are better managed and more engaging, which creates an ideal experience for the prospect or client. Looking for a platform to enable to gain this capability? Cisco Webex has a reliable screen sharing solution to facilitate better sales calls.