Ep 44 – How a virtual selling cockpit can improve video conferencing ? – Gilles Bertaux

Gilles : Hi, thank you for having me. I hope like people tolerate our accents, but we’ll see. Gabriel : So what makes you different from the other platform ? Gilles : Yeah. So my take is that most of the platforms, I mean in the world, like main competitors, like to the big one, like Zoom, Teams and WhatsApp, all those guys, they mostly focus on providing a video experience, like a communication experience where we, on the other hand, are trying to provide an experience that is actually tailored for the job of the person hosting the video, which is a very different nuance actually. When you use video conferencing for selling as a sales or as a marketer, you expect to have… you have target, you know, you have objective, you wanna sell and then you need, as a result, you will need like some tools to accomplish, to, you know, achieve that. So at the end of the day, what we wanna provide is not only video, but like the tools that will enable you to sell more, sell more efficiently. So on the webinar context, like we do, it’s pretty much like maximizing the engagement because the more engagement you get, the richer the content, and the more results, the more conversions you usually drive. And for the virtual selling kind of product, team kind of meeting, then it’s more of about treating this cockpit of having sales tools, such as, I don’t know, templates, Salesdeck, whatever is relevant to make sure you close this demo. Right. And give a great demo. So it’s a whole different paradigm, you know, it’s just we focus on the overall user experience and not just the video itself and that hasn’t been bread and butter from the day one. Gabriel : Okay. So we will dig into this virtual selling cockpit for virtual sellers and for virtual sales team. How do you envision this cockpit in five years ? What salesperson will be able to do within Livestorm to be a better salesperson person ? Gilles : You mean as a tool, so what do we do to help them ? Gabriel : Yeah. Gilles : So essentially what we’re trying to do. So there is like two contexts, right ? Because we do webinars and we do meetings and basically on the webinar context, what we’re trying to do is provide basically engagement features what we call engagement features. So not just going beyond web and screen sharing and… it’s a one way. Usually, webinar is a one way presentation. We wanna make that two ways, like have a lot of people responding, either through chat questions, polls, but also interacting with the content that you provide. So basically if you’re gonna share a mirror board, you can invite people to actually interact with the board, you know, with the whiteboard and everything. So provide something that is very much interactive, so that at the end of the day, your webinars is a success, you get a ton of engagement and all that engagement translates into more of this kind of collective enthusiasm that, you know makes a product looks good, the brand looks good, the sales looks good. So at the end of the day, you help conversion by doing that. So webinar contacts is all about like maximizing their engagement. The virtual selling, kind of product demo use case, if you talk about sales, then we want to provide the tooling bill, like the toolbox, all the stuff the cockpit that you want to have in order to sell more and sell more efficiently. So, that translates with analytics, obviously to know how much a person stayed. If that person was, I don’t know, engaged with whatever you shared or that sort of thing. The second piece is obviously connectors. As a sales, you use a bunch of, you know, CRM or whatever. So we wanna connect very deeply with those tools. And the last bit is providing stuff during the live to help you present. So typically, integrating with Google slides, full starter, if you know, that’s something you want to share to your customer. I know at some point we wanna integrate with SalesLoft, with Salesdeck, with all those tools who have like really build this kind of, you have a timeline on the side, you’ll see all the content that you want to share. So we were creating this cockpit and that’s the virtual selling product demo is still an early subject that we studied this year. And we have tons of things that we want to still ship for that specific use case. But basically the goal is that providing a tooled, the goal is not engagement is about making the sales more efficient during the demo, which is a bit different. Gabriel : Yes, our goal is common because. the goal of Salesdeck is really providing a tool to have more engagement, but also a tool to achieve sales excellence, and to make sure that the best practice are adopted by both, low performers, top performers that they all share a common structures of doing their customer meeting, being better prepped, more engaging and better documented. So we really have this and this common goal and working on different tools. You are working on video and we are more working on the playbook and the content to be shared during meetings. Gilles : Yeah, absolutely. That’s, that’s exactly that. Gabriel : And that’s interesting, our two different companies, are addressing the same goal and try to work together to build this common view of the cockpit, where everything will be integrated for the seller, but for the buyer too, because the buyer should be part of the experience. Gilles : Absolutely. As I said, you know, it’s a two way thing, you know. If someone, if something, if a conversation, whatever that is, it’s a webinar meeting, whatever the context. You know, if it is a one way thing, it basically, it’s just you hearing yourself pitching something, but every conversation is someone responding. So it has to be two way things and, yeah, having the capacity to interact as a buyer, as a participant with the content that you actually present, it makes things so much more efficient from a sales perspective. Gabriel : Sure. And when you dig into all the sales methodologies, the idea is really not to pitch, but really to, uh, to dig, to discover, to understand, the pain of your customer, and to help me help him discover the right solution. And hopefully the right solution is yours. Gilles : Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing that does Salesdeck is very interesting, you know, they provide this kind of structure mental thing, where actually, if, as a buyer, I don’t really know how to express the need or express something that is happening in my company that is actually in need that you’ll be interested in. You know, you provide this kind of structure like cards and almost, you know, as a form, right. And people can just check and say, okay, this and more into that kind of answer. And that gives a hint. As a sales, what a person needs and what a person is all about. So providing some kind of mental framework for the buyer using Salesdeck or using whatever, you know, trick you, you have to make them interact with you is definitely beneficial for the sales pitch. Gabriel : Yeah. And what is true is within in person meeting, we have more, physical interaction, more emotions that go through, with video, we have less emotion. We have a small part of the screens that we, where you can see the other, but you have all the way to create interaction, which is, as you say, polls all kind chats, emojis, and you have to use them to multiply the different channel to communicate with your buyers and to give, to have opportunities to interact. Gilles : Absolutely. Gabriel : Okay, thanks a lot. Is there ways that people could contact you and contact Livestorm ? Gilles : Sure. Absolutely. You can go to Livestorm website at livestorm.io.co, and you can reach out. We have this chat, you can, you know, ask for a demo for sales, if we’re interested or just create a free account, actually, do you have it’s the whole free trial thing and just test it out and no strings attached, nothing. And you just, if you wanna move forward, just move forward. You know, you can push your credit card in. And as for me, if you wanna reach out I’m on Twitter. So, actually that’s gonna be a hard one to spell, but Gilles Bertaux, essentially, maybe you can leave that in the description of the podcast, but you can find me pretty easily on Twitter. Just type Gilles Twitter lifestyle, you’ll find me right. Gabriel : Okay, thanks a lot Gilles. This episode of the virtual selling podcast is over. Thanks for sticking around. Join us twice a week for a new episode, with new stories and challenge of giants in the field. If you enjoy today’s episode, we are always listening for your feedback. Share the show and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you don’t miss any episode. This episode was brought to you by Salesdeck.io, the virtual saying platform that increase your sales team efficiency and sales readiness, enable remote management and bumps sales operational excellence. Book your Salesdeck.io demo today to discover how you can close more deal with engaging and better prepped customer meetings. Thanks a lot, Gilles. Gilles : Thank you.