How many times have you been on a meeting that people seemed to be bothered to be in? How many times did people drive a lack of engagement and have to be asked multiple times to respond? This is a topic that effects most people working in this world utilizing online meetings more than ever before.
Last week I talked about The Ringleman Effect of larger meetings and why it drove lack of engagement. I ended that topic with the need to build rapport during meetings with others.
This week we will focus on ways to gain rapport with others so that way we can gain more engagement during online meetings.
First and foremost, we need to remember that when we are hosting meetings, we are asking others to give up one of their most precious commodities. Something they can not add, multiple, but only subtract. It’s their time. Time is the most precious of commodities to individuals and organizations.
We need to make sure that we are focused on others if we are going to build engagement. To do that we need to build relationships with them. The hot word on this topic currently is Rapport. If you have heard me speak at any event / training you know that I believe rapport is something we should start with, but we need to go deeper with others.
That is why I do the house exercise in my trainings to help individuals take the focus off ourselves and onto the others they are engaging with.
We can start with rapport building, but the focus is to really care about others so much so that we want to learn about them and help them. When we do this, we will build trust and engagement.
For online meetings a good resource is “Virtual Selling” chapter 4. I am always looking to grow my capacity and I do that even by investing in reading material from other professionals. We are all in this together. This book that I am reading has a great deal of ideas on how to grow rapport during online meetings.
This book goes into the differences between 2D virtual meetings and face to face meetings. Where we can usually have casual discussion before and after a meeting naturally in real world meetings, but on virtural meetings typically the start right into the meat of the meeting. There is little if not zero time to have casual discussions.
It’s harder in the virtual meeting to build rapport, but there are some ways that we can do this if we pay attention to details and focus on those in the meeting. Having smaller meeting sizes will also help us with this. This book gives 20 questions to ask during the meeting with others to learn and grow rapport.
They also have a few rules like authenticity, similarity, and shared experiences which is similar to what we would do when meeting in person. One thing they suggest is to ask someone to stay after for a few minutes so we can dive deeper into a comment that person made during the meeting. Not earth shattering epiphany, but one that will gain small deposits of rapport over time. We will also know if we have some relational collateral with them if they accept, or decline.
Learning how to run virtual meetings and building trust and influence is going to be crucial as we go forward with this ever-changing environment. More and more people are choosing to work remote which makes it harder to build rapport. We can’t take them out for coffee, or a meal as often. We can set up a quick call to share coffee online, but I would be hesitant to eat food online in front of them. It will save them if we spit our food when we talk I guess…
Focus on learning about people and expanding our knowledge how to build trust and influence will go a long way in growing our sales capacity in the next decade as technology makes it harder for us to meet in person.
Have a great week!
“Businesses wonder why it is still hard to be thought of as the brand of choice with customers. How can our business make more profitable transactions and stay out of the commodity battle with low profits? I equip your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate explosive revenues with greater profits!”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lWIVasmkFsoYL4h0AqIZgH6LC3qaw_gI/view?usp=sharing – client profile sheet
https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Process-Uncovered-Success-Influence/dp/0578421518 - Book
https://kevinsidebottom.kartra.com/page/5AF12 - Sales Process Uncovered Online Training
https://kevinsidebottom.kartra.com/page/68N10 - Trustworthy Online Training