What is the Best Environment for a Sales Call?

A lot of factors can influence whether a sale closes or not. Sometimes, the environment where the sales call itself takes place can help or hurt chances. While you don’t see average salespeople putting much time into arranging the right physical environment and ambience for a meeting, the top ones do.

Here are five tips for creating the best environment for a sales call, whether you’re speaking one-on-one or to a small audience, and no matter the specific venue you end up in. Needless to say, if you are meeting in the prospect’s office, you cannot really control anything, which is why you should always try to meet on neutral ground or your office.

1.       Arrive early and take a moment to move things around.

When possible, dictate where equipment will go and who sits where. It’s your show, so control it. Even if you meet in the prospect’s lair, you should request a moment to set up, test any multimedia equipment and define the meeting space.

Most people are gracious and more than willing to allow the salesperson a brief moment to oversee arrangements. When the salesperson is comfortable with the physical space, the sales process can proceed more smoothly.

 2.       Ensure a clear line of sight for every face and body.

Because you must be attuned to both verbal and non-verbal cues from prospects, make sure you can see them clearly.  When salesperson and prospects can see eye to eye and pick up on hand and body gestures, they can judge the truth of any statements made, develop rapport and create an atmosphere of trust.

If a prospect is long distance and needs to rely on technology and attend a virtual meeting, it should be a visual not an audio one so that the entire upper body of both parties can be observed.  By valuing the need to see body language, salespeople can pick up on early hints of sales objection and adjust the presentation to tackle concerns before they are spoken.

3.       Ditch the grub

Although building rapport is important, remember that a sales call is a business transaction. You are there to make yourself and the company money, not waste time with chit chat.

To that end, apart from a lunch meeting where this is unavoidable, having food and drinks at a meeting is generally a bad idea. Coffee, tea, water or soft drinks are okay, because everyone can keep talking, but more than that can be a distraction and take the focus off the sales presentation. Business, needs, solutions and closing should be the primary focus – not eating. Leave that for schmoozing an existing client for referrals.

4.       Clean up your desk

From looking at someone’s desk, I can tell whether they are scatterbrained, responsible, overworked, control-freaks, good time-managers and so on. The way someone treats their possessions is an excellent reflection of their mental state and values, and how they deal with business.

This doesn’t mean that messy people can’t be geniuses. In fact, many artists and deep thinkers tend to have a lot of stuff in their spaces, with week-old coffee and half-eaten donuts lying atop mounds of scrap paper. But in the world of B2B sales, you rarely find such people attracting, let alone closing, million-dollar deals.

If a sales call is happening in your office, look the part of an organized professional and clean up your desk.

5.       Control the time

Although not a physical item per se, time is a very important factor is creating a comfortable sales call environment. It’s no use to be rushed, so establish a pre-determined window with the prospect that allows ample time for you to conduct the full sales presentation, answer any questions, and take the order.

Keep things concise in order to prevent the buyer from feeling restless and wondering if the sales chat will spill over and interfere with subsequent business or commitments. Always observe the agreed upon time limit and, as much as possible, finish early. This requires that your sales presentation be lean, rehearsed and full of essential information.

The environment in which a sales call happens can affect your closing ratio. Therefore, the best sales call environment is one which you control from beginning to end to eliminate distractions.