Today, I had my first sales call in 13 months where the prospect was in person in the room (all of us were on Zoom)…
The 5 minutes at the start of the meeting to get the projector connected made me so nostalgic!!!!
— Nick Mehta (@nrmehta) April 21, 2021
An open question for a while during the Covid Era was would we really ever get back to in-person sales meetings?
Wasn’t closing deals over Zoom 10x more efficient? It sure has seemed like it. You can see our great convo with the SVP of Commercial Sales at Salesforce below on just how many more customers they were able to touch over Zoom.
And yet … and yet. Especially bigger deals just close faster, easier, and with more retention when you meet face-to-face. At least, historically that’s been the case. Personally, I never lost a larger customer — not one — that I met in person. More on that here.
So is it a new world now?
Well, we’ll see. But more than 40% of you are already are doing in-person customer meetings, or plan to shortly:
VCs are already back to meeting founders in most deals. Not for the first meeting, but generally thereafter for any large check.
Many of the AEs I’ve talked to this week are doing their first coffee meetings with existing customers and prospects this week and next.
We’re going back to a hybrid world, no doubt.
But it looks like in-person sales and customer meetings are rapidly returning. Probably very rapidly.
