How To Get Customers Without Attending Networking Events
by Leanne Mordue on 21-Jan-2022 10:00:00
Networking events have been the backbone of sales for many businesses for many years – from the largest international symposiums to the local Chamber of Commerce business breakfasts. If, as a business owner, you traditionally relied on networking events to keep your leads coming in and have struggled to find a replacement for face-to-face events, or if you’re interested in finding an easier and cheaper way of generating leads, then this article is for you.
Read on to find out how video sales and other digital marketing strategies can help you get high value customers without having to attend networking events.
The downside of networking events
Despite the popularity of networking events, they aren’t always the most efficient ways to generate leads and sustain relationships.
Difficult to arrange – face-to-face meetings are often hard to arrange at a time that suits all parties, and the more people involved, the more difficult this becomes. This means that leads can go cold while waiting weeks or even months to arrange a face-to-face sales meeting.
- Extensive travel time – Travel is expensive in terms of time and money.
- Expensive to produce – many networking events, especially tradeshows, take a lot of time and money to prepare for, putting a lot of pressure on your team to capitalise on every opportunity.
The alternative – video sales
Advocates of face-to-face sales emphasise the value of in-person contact to create business relationships, and how purely online sales can fail to nurture the trust and credibility necessary to close a deal. And we agree with this. The alternative to networking events doesn’t do away with real-time meetings, relationship building, and personal contact – it simply replicates them online through using videoconferencing platforms.
Businesses quickly fell in love with Microsoft Teams and Zoom in the early months of the pandemic. These platforms allowed teams to keep in touch and work together internally, and they also allowed businesses to engage in effective sales meetings with their clients and prospects. You could chat to your prospects in real time, seeing their facial expressions and body language, and conveying information, in exactly the same way as if you were in the same room together.
Video sales applications, such as Vidyard, extend that potential even further. You can now use a smart phone camera to record ad hoc live streams for Facebook Live, arrange short notice videos, and even record entire sales meetings for training and collaboration purposes.
From a sales perspective, virtual networking events have several key advantages:
- No travel time – leave the car at home! Virtual sales meetings can be conducted from any location, whether attendees are working from the office, the factory floor, or from home.
- Less time-consuming – face-to-face meetings tend to be long, drawn-out affairs, which is understandable when it’s taken so long to get all the stakeholders together in one place. Once the burden of travel is removed, businesses are free to arrange shorter meetings, often at short notice, too, potentially reducing your sales cycle.
- Less hard sell – sales teams are frequently under a lot of pressure to get results from networking meetings, so a lot rides on closing a deal in one or two meetings. For many industries, this isn’t realistic, especially where high-value or complex products and services are involved. By using video in your sales processs, you have the flexibility to schedule several short meetings over a couple of weeks, providing information in bite-size chunks that are easier to dissect and understand, and giving the prospect the opportunity to ask questions and give full consideration to their investment. It’s a more relaxed and successful sales process for all involved, and results in stronger and more valuable business relationships.
Digital networking and sales support from JDR group
Over the past two years, businesses have had to adapt to new ways of building relationships in the absence of face-to-face sales meetings, conferences, and networking events. We look forward to the resumption of these events. However, as we have seen, it is equally possible to generate leads and nurture customers using digital marketing methods, without losing the benefits of personal engagement and face-to-face contact – and adopting these strategies is a good way of saving time and money and actually increasing your number of sales.
To find out more about how digital sales works in practice, including how we use marketing automation, video, and digital lead generation tactics to help our customers grow their business, please contact one of our inbound marketing specialists today.
Image Source: Unsplash
- Inbound Marketing (SEO, PPC, Social Media, Video) (807)
- Strategy (350)
- Marketing Automation & Email Marketing (180)
- Sales & CRM (176)
- Website Design (157)
- Business Growth (145)
- Hubspot (123)
- Lead Generation (109)
- Google Adwords (97)
- Content Marketing (91)
- News (46)
- Case Studies (43)
- Conversion (43)
- Ecommerce (36)
- Webinars (30)
- SEO (22)
- Events (19)
- Video (17)
- LinkedIn Advertising (15)
- Video Selling (15)
- AI (13)
- Software training (13)
- Niche business marketing (11)
- The Digital Prosperity Podcast (10)
- Facebook Advertising (6)
- September 2025 (1)
- August 2025 (14)
- July 2025 (14)
- June 2025 (5)
- May 2025 (19)
- April 2025 (15)
- March 2025 (13)
- February 2025 (13)
- January 2025 (8)
- December 2024 (2)
- November 2024 (4)
- October 2024 (21)
- September 2024 (4)
- August 2024 (8)
- July 2024 (14)
- June 2024 (16)
- May 2024 (25)
- April 2024 (15)
- March 2024 (18)
- February 2024 (5)
- January 2024 (10)
- December 2023 (6)
- November 2023 (10)
- October 2023 (13)
- September 2023 (12)
- August 2023 (14)
- July 2023 (13)
- June 2023 (14)
- May 2023 (15)
- April 2023 (13)
- March 2023 (14)
- February 2023 (13)
- January 2023 (15)
- December 2022 (13)
- November 2022 (6)
- October 2022 (8)
- September 2022 (22)
- August 2022 (15)
- July 2022 (13)
- June 2022 (16)
- May 2022 (14)
- April 2022 (16)
- March 2022 (17)
- February 2022 (11)
- January 2022 (8)
- December 2021 (6)
- November 2021 (7)
- October 2021 (11)
- September 2021 (10)
- August 2021 (7)
- July 2021 (7)
- June 2021 (4)
- May 2021 (4)
- April 2021 (1)
- March 2021 (3)
- February 2021 (5)
- January 2021 (4)
- December 2020 (7)
- November 2020 (6)
- October 2020 (5)
- September 2020 (9)
- August 2020 (18)
- July 2020 (17)
- June 2020 (17)
- May 2020 (10)
- April 2020 (21)
- March 2020 (24)
- February 2020 (21)
- January 2020 (12)
- December 2019 (23)
- November 2019 (12)
- October 2019 (14)
- September 2019 (16)
- August 2019 (15)
- July 2019 (13)
- June 2019 (6)
- May 2019 (8)
- April 2019 (4)
- March 2019 (2)
- February 2019 (2)
- January 2019 (2)
- December 2018 (3)
- November 2018 (24)
- September 2018 (11)
- August 2018 (9)
- June 2018 (3)
- May 2018 (6)
- April 2018 (14)
- March 2018 (12)
- February 2018 (16)
- January 2018 (15)
- December 2017 (15)
- November 2017 (18)
- October 2017 (23)
- September 2017 (19)
- August 2017 (28)
- July 2017 (27)
- June 2017 (25)
- May 2017 (18)
- April 2017 (17)
- March 2017 (16)
- February 2017 (17)
- January 2017 (14)
- December 2016 (21)
- November 2016 (27)
- October 2016 (25)
- September 2016 (16)
- August 2016 (20)
- July 2016 (19)
- June 2016 (14)
- May 2016 (20)
- April 2016 (24)
- March 2016 (22)
- February 2016 (28)
- January 2016 (27)
- December 2015 (28)
- November 2015 (19)
- October 2015 (9)
- September 2015 (12)
- August 2015 (5)
- July 2015 (1)
- June 2015 (10)
- May 2015 (3)
- April 2015 (11)
- March 2015 (14)
- February 2015 (15)
- January 2015 (12)
- December 2014 (2)
- November 2014 (23)
- October 2014 (2)
- September 2014 (2)
- August 2014 (2)
- July 2014 (2)
- June 2014 (7)
- May 2014 (14)
- April 2014 (14)
- March 2014 (7)
- February 2014 (2)
- January 2014 (7)
- December 2013 (9)
- November 2013 (14)
- October 2013 (17)
- September 2013 (3)
- August 2013 (6)
- July 2013 (8)
- June 2013 (4)
- May 2013 (3)
- April 2013 (6)
- March 2013 (6)
- February 2013 (7)
- January 2013 (5)
- December 2012 (3)
- November 2012 (2)
- September 2012 (1)
Subscribe by email
You May Also Like
These Related Blogs

4 Easy Ways To Adapt Your Website To Google Hummingbird
Are you unsure what changes you need to make to your website since Google released its latest update - Google Hummingbird? Are you unsure what Google …

A Quick Guide To A/B Testing In Google Analytics
Designing a successful lead generation website is both an art and a science. Google Analytics allows you to test which landing pages and design ideas …

The Google Disavow Tool: 5 Do's & Don’ts (When & When NOT To Disavow)
What is the Google Disavow Tool? The Google disavow links tool is a feature of Google Webmaster tools. It lets you submit a file that tells Google whi …