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Building trust and alignment across the customer lifecycle is more important than ever in the wake of the disruptions of 2020. Fortunately, MURAL makes it easier than ever to understand customers' challenges and co-create solutions, even when you can't collaborate in person. Whether you work with prospective customers during the sales process or you manage the customer relationship, MURAL gives you the tools you need to run effective sales calls, meetings, and workshops that are tailored to your customers' working preferences.
How do we do it? Here are some common friction points that we hear over and over — both in our own sellers’ discovery process and from our Community — and the solutions we see succeed.
For getting on the same page quickly with new or prospective customers
The customer journey starts well before a contract is signed. Every touchpoint with your organization impacts the customer experience — so it’s crucial to provide value and begin building the customer relationship from day one.
For Sales and Customer Success teams, this means deeply understanding customers’ challenges in order to provide the best solution. But the best way to build empathy and understanding isn’t with a one-way presentation that you could recite in your sleep. Bring your prospects actively into the conversation by adding a mural with interactive activities to draw out engagement from everyone on the call.
- If your customers are new to visual collaboration, use custom toolbar to limit the features they have access to in this first session. For example, you can focus their options to only sticky notes, text, and images — leaving diagramming and shapes to a future session when they’re MURAL pros.
- With presentation mode, you can include explanatory information on the same canvas you use to collaborate on methods and activities later in your meeting. Much more engaging than a static slide deck!
- Try turning on private mode if you want unfiltered opinions from everyone in your meeting — it hides new additions to the mural until you turn it off.
- Share a visitor link with prospects or customers when you want to give them easy, no sign-up access to your mural. All MURAL plans include unlimited visitors.
For the customer whose calendar is always packed
Even with high-priority and high-visibility initiatives, customers can be preoccupied with their day-to-day business. Finding quality calendar time can be a struggle — especially with teams located across time zones. Asynchronous collaboration can be as effective as in-person meetings when you have the right tools and facilitation strategies.
- Integrations are your friend. Pin your mural to wherever you and your customers connect online: a calendar invite, a Slack channel, a Microsoft Teams channel, or a Webex space. Get in the habit of always keeping your current murals front and center.
- Try setting up MURAL’s anonymous voting feature for async collaboration. You can choose the number of votes you want to give each collaborator, select which objects you want to be eligible for votes, and even choose a specific area of the canvas to focus votes on. Then just share the link with collaborators and leave the session open any duration of time. Voting is great for understanding your customers’ priorities and sentiments, especially when you’re working with a diverse group of stakeholders.
- Communicating with comments and @ mentions allows you to ask for clarity as needed from async collaborators, so they’ll be notified to revisit the mural.
If your meetings always run over time
We all know the pain of back-to-back meetings, and no one benefits from being rushed from topic to topic. This is especially true during the sales process and the early phases of the customer relationship, when you’re focused on deeply understanding their challenges.
Fortunately, there’s way more you can do with MURAL to keep conversations on track than just setting a timer (although I do recommend the cuckoo bird noise when you do).
- Timebox all activities and do time checks regularly to ensure the meeting is moving forward.
- Add more focus to your sessions by summoning everyone to your view and using laser pointer (command H on a Mac).
Create a “parking lot” section on the mural for off-topic questions, as well as a “decisions and action items” section for documenting decisions and next steps.
For organizing customer presentations and resources
- Use the outline to organize the content in your mural. You can create areas on the mural that work just like slides in a deck (but more interactive!), and use the outline to jump between sections.
- Folders and rooms are your best friends for workspace organization. Use folders as a file system within your customer rooms or project rooms. The folders and sub-folders will have the same access and permissions as the room — so all folders in a private room will be limited to collaborators with room access.
- Use your content library to keep assets you plan to use repeatedly at your fingertips: everything from branding and logos to your headshots and bio.
Find what works, then scale it with templates
In a remote or hybrid work setting, it can be hard to keep everyone engaged and aligned. The solution? MURAL templates.
With MURAL, there are two types of templates: templates we’ve created with experts as starting points for you and templates you create and publish for your customers or teammates to follow.
Here are five of the top templates that sellers and customer success teams love.
- Customer Discovery Canvas by Somersault Innovation
- Collaborative Presentation
- User Journey by Accenture Interactive NL
- Stakeholder Mapping by Somersault Innovation
- SWOT Analysis
Our templates are guides to save you time, spread best practices, and inspire your own creativity. Once you copy one, it's yours to modify and adjust to make it work for your customers and represent your own unique POV.
To prepare for your next remote meeting or workshop, download the Definitive Guide to Facilitating Remote Workshops.
About the authors
About the authors
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