Should You Always Opt For Online Meetings With International Clients?
You might think that with all of its great features, Callbridge and other leading conferencing platforms have killed the face-to-face business meeting. Callbridge’s online meeting room allows you to connect your audio and video, share PDFs and other documents, and even record your meeting for later — so why go back to meeting the old-fashioned way?
The truth is, old habits die hard. Although holding an online meeting may be technically better, there are still huge swaths of the business population that prefer to do some things as they’ve always been done in the past: in person.
When it comes to international business relationships in particular, here are a couple of things you need to know.
International Business Clients Like To Agree To New Business In Person
Despite the fact that they could join your online meeting room in a single click, most business people will feel unsure about agreeing to new business without meeting you in-person at least once. Even if they are thousands of kilometres away, stopping by for a day or two to allay their fears and shake hands over the deal will go a long way towards making a good impression.
You might say that that both parties would save time and energy if they agreed to hold an online meeting instead of an in-person one, and you’d be right. The real problem is that it’s hard for someone to trust you if you’ve never met in person. Sure, online meetings give you the power to collaborate, but they don’t really show people what kind of person you are away from a computer screen.
Online Meetings Are Perfect For Staying Up-To-Date
One thing Callbridge’s online meetings are perfect for is staying in touch after the initial meeting. Once your international business clients have met you, conference calling is the perfect way to connect in terms of both time and cost. You can schedule weekly or monthly calls under a single dial-in number and access code to make connection easy for your guests, or jump into a call right away if there is a new development.
The Politics Of Travel: Should You Stay Or Should You Go?
So let’s say you agree to meet with your potential client in person, and it goes well. After that, you proceed without incident for the next 8 months using Callbridge to keep in touch and collaborate. Now it’s almost the holiday season, and your client has invited you to their party –in their country. You aren’t necessarily overjoyed at the idea of travelling over the holidays, but your client is an important one. What do you do?
For your client, physically meeting them will always be more important than holding an online meeting, for the simple reason that it is a heavier investment. Sure, Callbridge let’s you meet in a second, but the act of paying for a plane ticket and flying to a different country shows how invested you are in your business relationship.
It’s a little counter-intuitive, but the smarter and easier online meetings get, the more that business partners will value face-to-face interactions. So whatever you choose to do, just remember that conference calls can’t, and shouldn’t replace other gestures.
For Everything Else, There’s Callbridge
Callbridge isn’t trying to replace the feeling of actually meeting with someone over the holidays, and we aren’t afraid to admit it. What we are trying to do is make the rest of your meetings smarter, better, and more efficient.
If you haven’t tried Callbridge yet, and would like to take advantage of cutting-edge features like AI-assisted searchable transcriptions and the ability to conference from any device without downloads, consider trying Callbridge free for 30 days.
