This year, B2B sales professionals have been faced with the challenge of transitioning their events and meetings to the virtual world. Without the in-person component, it’s important to lead with a unique message that not only captures attention, but also makes your interaction a memorable experience and keeps potential buyers engaged. The offer of a meal can be an incredibly powerful way to turn your cold calls into meetings, facilitate a better conversation, and close more business.
Business lunches have always been a strong tool when it comes to sales strategies. Sharing a meal is one of the best ways to turn your prospects into loyal customers.
In this post, we share B2B sales tips for using meals to increase your cold call conversion rate in this newly digital world.
Why Food Works in the Newly Digital Landscape
While lunch meetings have been a popular sales tool for many years, this new fully virtual world we live in has turned the traditional lunch upside down. Many sales professionals have found prospecting and cold outreach difficult this year. With increasingly crowded voicemails and inboxes, it’s been incredibly challenging to break through all the noise and capture the attention of hard-to-reach potential buyers.
Food has shaped decision-making for years and can be a powerful persuader. Many sales professionals find that just the suggestion of a free meal can turn a cold lead into a warm one.
Leveraging the Virtual Meeting
Sales teams across the United States are discovering the benefits of providing meals for virtual meetings. Many sales reps have found success in warming up their cold calls by offering a meal either before, during, or after the meeting depending on their specific goals and subject to applicable laws, rules, and policies.
- If you’re focused on generating responses, consider offering a meal to those who reply to your message as a way to kick off the conversation. Make sure you’re hyper-targeted in your outreach, so you’re only offering meals to high-value prospects.
- Once a prospect books a meeting, consider offering a meal credit to be enjoyed during your meeting. This makes the meeting feel like a true business lunch.
- Consider sending the meal credit after your meeting concludes to ensure the prospect attends.
You can also experiment with different ways to frame the offer. A few of our B2B sales tips also include:
- Invite potential buyers to a breakfast meeting at the beginning of the day. Coffee and bagels delivered straight to a prospect’s door has proven effective in securing meetings.
- If there are multiple stakeholders involved, some sales reps are hosting discussion-based dinners. You can send a formal invitation, set a theme and agenda for the night, and ensure the discussion includes fun topics in addition to the business objectives.
- While days can often be packed with meetings, we all need to eat. You can ask for a lunch meeting where the attendee’s lunch will be delivered; it’s something that they would have already done that day and therefore it can seem like less of an ask and a more compelling offer.
Setting Parameters for Sales Professionals with a Grubhub Corporate Account
One reason B2B Sales teams across the nation are leveraging a Grubhub Corporate Account to provide meals for virtual meetings is because of the customization options. With one Corporate Account you can grant access to a set budget for all of your sales reps so they can easily send a meal credit for the meetings they win. The reps can set up an ordering window so that the prospect can only order during the actual meeting, or you can send it after the call as a thank you for chatting.
You and your team have complete control over how to facilitate the meals. You’ll find that like many sales teams across the country, using meals helps you stand out in crowded inboxes and ultimately increases your cold call conversion rate.
We’re here to discuss more B2B sales tips to help you turn your cold calls into meetings. Ready to learn more about using a Grubhub Corporate Accounts as a simple, cost-effective solution to win more sales meetings?
