STAND UP! for your online meetings with prospects

I never, ever sit down when I’m meeting with a prospective customer online. It’s something I’ve been doing for so many years, it’s automatic for me now, and it’s something I’ve seen the best sellers I know do as well.

But I know from the number of sales meetings I sit in on or review with early-stage founders and salespeople who don’t do this that it’s not an obvious thing to do.

Yet it is an easy thing to do and has lots of benefits. Here are the main three:

Boosts energy and enthusiasm

When you stand-up, it creates real physical differences in your body. Blood circulation and oxygen delivery to tissues improves, helping you feel more awake and energised. This improves your mood, your concentration and how dynamic you are on your calls.

Your voice will sound more vibrant, you will transmit your energy and enthusiasm for solving whatever problem your prospect has.

All of these are critical to building rapport and trust with your prospect to help build momentum in your deals.

Projects Confidence and Professionalism

Standing helps you to project a sense of confidence and professionalism through the greater energy and engagement you’ll be feeling. It’s very easy when you’re sitting down to sound lethargic, to look disengaged, even when you’re not.

Remember, your prospect isn’t just buying your solution, they’re buying into you as an individual to have the experience and knowledge to solve their problem.

Your demeanor on your calls can have a really meaningful impact on how your prospects perceive you, your business and your solution.

Stands You Out From The Crowd

If your prospect is seriously looking for a solution, it’s likely that they’re talking to several other potential vendors as well as you.

Standing up allows you to move more freely, to use body language to help you communicate and incorporate more subtle movements to add nuance to your conversation. Because of your energy, because of your engagement, because of how you project yourself when you’re standing up, you will, quite literally, stand out from the crowd.

Your prospects will remember you and while they may not remember everything about your solution, they will remember the feeling they had when they met you.

Rebuilds Human Connection

While online meetings do have an important role to play in your sales cycles, the one thing they are awful for is building a relationship with your prospect. All of the engagement, the nuance, the body language, the tone, the feeling that your prospect gets from meeting you in person, most of that gets lost when you meet online.

Standing up on your sales calls (and other important meetings) helps mitigate some of this loss and allows you to build more trust and a stronger relationship with your prospect.

Of course, actually meeting your prospects in person does away with all the downsides of meeting online, and you can find out more about why it’s critical that you’re meeting your prospects in person in my blog ‘Get On A Plane (Or bus, or car, or train)’

But for now, let’s say you want to stand up in your online sales meetings, how do you go about actually doing it?

Makes Standing Easy Anywhere

If you’re working at home and have the space, probably the easiest way is to buy a standing desk, one that with a quick press of a button allows you to raise and lower your desk so you can work sitting and meet standing. There are lots of these on Amazon around the £100 mark with 4.5 star and above reviews.

If you’re not able to do that, then think about how you can quickly convert the space you have into a standing desk.

In my home office, I inherited a built-in wooden desk from the previous owners that weighs about 150kg and would require new flooring and redecoration of the walls to remove, so opted instead for this set up:

It consists of a gas spring monitor mount and a simple laptop table – total cost around £60. Takes about 30 seconds to convert from sitting to standing, including putting an anti-fatigue standing mat in place (which I do recommend).

I also highly recommend having a second screen when you’re running your sales meetings. You can see on the top of my monitor I have a webcam. I always display the zoom meeting on the large monitor and then take notes in a document on my laptop. This allows you to see the person / people you’re talking to in a larger window so you can pick up more nuance of what they’re saying while still having plenty of room for your notes on the laptop.

While we’re talking about online meetings, I’m also a big fan of auto-hiding self-view if you’re using zoom (it will allow you to frame yourself in the zoom window before you let anyone into the meeting). I started doing this about 3 years ago and have found it helps me concentrate more on the person or people I’m meeting with. Imagine sitting in a meeting room with a mirror on the table in front of you – that’s how distracting self-view is in an online meeting!

If you’re taking sales meetings in the office, talk to your manager about getting the same sort of setup either with standing desks or a gas arm. If you have booths, lobby to get them converted to standing spaces (show them this article if that would help).

You can see below the setup we have in the booths at the Crane offices, which allow us to either sit down or stand up for our meetings. Essentially the desk is fixed at standing height, and we have tall chairs if you want to sit down. The only addition I’d make here if we were a sales team is to have second monitors for these desks.

Any questions, or if you want to let me know about your experience of standing up for your sales meetings, just DM me or email me at ben@crane.vc.

Best of luck with your meetings!