Efficiency vs. Effectiveness in Meeting New Customers

10.02.2022

A brief respite from COVID19 that much of the world experienced during the fall of 2021 gave us at Goodmill a good chance to look at how different in-person and online sales processes are.

The beginning of the pandemic in 2020 saw many changes in our company as a new CEO joined us and we redesigned our sales processes to work in a pandemic. After having run these new processes for a bit more than a year, they were quite well established when the world opened again for the abovementioned moment. Our sales team attended three specific events, which gave us the opportunity to compare the online model with in-person sales: We were invited to participate in the Finnish-Swedish Defense Industry Seminar in Stockholm, we joined the Critical Communications Finland pavilion at the Critical Communications World event in Madrid and finally we were part of the business delegation to Brazil led by Finland’s minister of foreign trade mister Ville Skinnari.

“Presidente da Goodmill Systems” waiting for the start of the meeting with ministers Skinnari and Torres.

Our core market of public safety is a relatively slow-moving market – decisions are not made in weeks and often not even in months. Therefore, we do not yet have revenue to show for these efforts and cannot compare the efforts on a pure return on investment basis. However, we can certainly already look at some leading KPIs.

As expected, the number of new contacts from an in-person event pales in comparison to some of the most efficient online networking platforms. Where in a few days of travel and meetings, one can expect to meet some tens of persons, in an online event it is sometimes possible to reach hundreds within a single day. Bear in mind that we are very strict to not do this by spamming. It is simply the virtue of having a list of people with titles and employers and the convenience of opening a chat with everyone you see a legitimate joint interest with. On many conferencing platforms, one is able to first get an understanding of every single attendee and then reach out to all the relevant parties. In a physical setting this would amount to about the same results as getting to speak two minutes with every single of the, say, two thousand attendees of an event. That’s by the way 4000 minutes or 66 hours of non-stop talking and listening. Quite a lot of camping in the cloak room – supposedly.

One could assume that what the in-person event loses in quantity, it makes up in quality – and this is partly true, but not in the way you’d likely expect. The discussions in these online events are perhaps on average better than in a live event, since everyone is able to know the other person’s background before engaging. Thus, the amount of those shortest conversations, where you simply learn who each other is to conclude you have no immediate topics to discuss, is minimized. Where the in-person events excel, are in meeting people who would be otherwise impossible to meet. These include both persons from national and organizational cultures where in-person interaction is more highly preferred and persons who by their personality or organizational stature are hard to reach out to online.

The ability to meet with the very key decisionmakers in-person was prominently felt both during the trip to Brazil and during the seminar in Stockholm, which in turn was organized by the defence ministers of Finland and Sweden – mister Antti Kaikkonen and mister Peter Hultqvist respectively. It doesn’t require a minister to break the ice, but it sure helps in getting to the same room with, for example, generals. These meetings lead to discussions that may otherwise be completely beyond the reach of an SME by any other means. Calling a switchboard to talk to a general or a similar person in a civilian organization is a doomed effort and we’ve tried.

As in-person meetings also have a clear role in building trust over the longer term by really getting to know people, we believe that our operations in the future are going to be a smart combination of both: online and in-person. No matter what the future of the pandemic is, for an SME with a rapidly global customer base, the bulk of our interactions also in meeting new people will happen online. In-person, we’ll get to meet the people we already work with or those individuals we have the honor to be introduced to.

Minister Hultqvist starting his presentation at the Finnish- Swedish defense industry seminar.