Have you ever sat in an online meeting with a potential customer and thought things felt awkward?

I’ve been selling our Salesman.org sales training product to sales leaders, via mainly Skype video calls for years now and all of my meetings seemed awkward at first… until I figured a few things out.

Your online meetings feel awkward because you don’t have the same level of rapport with your prospect on video chat that you do in person.

There is no human contact with a handshake, it’s difficult for the person you’re meeting with to have eye contact with you and a lot of the body language cues we usually see aren’t always visible in an online video chat.

So in this video I’m going to explain 5 ways you can build instant report in sales to make them feel less awkward which will in turn help you get more deals done.

What is rapport?

First let’s very briefly look at what we’re trying to achieve with our online meetings. For a deal to get done, the buyer needs to have a trust with you. This is no different when you’re attempting to build rapport in sales as it is when you’re trying to meet someone new at a singles bar.

A lack of trust is like having a roadblock in the way of the sale progressing. With no trust your buyers might listen to your sales pitches but they’ll never get past a certain part of the sales process.

Now, your buyers doesn’t have to be your best friend but they do need to trust that you can deliver on the promises you make them.

Another way of defining trust is to us the word “rapport”.

Rapport can be described as two people having “mutual attentiveness”. Mutual attentiveness means that both people are both focused on and interested in the opportunities that each other can give them. In a selling scenario, these opportunities are the money in your buyers pocket, and your service to the buyers organization.

So now that we know why we want to build rapport (to get deals done) and what rapport is, let’s look at 5 ways we can engineer an increase of rapport over an online meeting.

#1 Look at the camera

This may seem simple but to build rapport fast in an online meeting you should look directly into your WebCam, rather than at the screen and the person you’re speaking with.

The subtle shift in your eyes looking down at the screen rather than the WebCam can leave a tangible level of disconnect between you and the person you’re engaging with.

Once the conversation is on the way you can then start to look at the individuals WebCam feed but for the first minute of your online meetings look directly into the camera.

That little black dot above your screen on your laptop is a hole into your buyers sole.

#2 Body language

Next, double down on your body language.

Salespeople often learn how they can use their body language to influence potential customers when they engage with them in person but for some reason this goes out of the window on an online video call.

Here are a few basic selling principles for you –

* When the buyer is saying something that is moving th...