(This Friday Meeting to Win continues a 3-week series called Maximize Customer Meetings – Before, During and After. To join us, subscribe here.)
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As we discussed in our recent post, Maximize Customer Meetings, Part 1: Before the Meeting, customer meetings are the goal of most of our sales activity. Those meetings launch sales cycles, move deals along and turn opportunities into signed deals. It makes sense that we spend time preparing for these and executing them effectively.
We’ve already discussed best practices before the customer meeting. After years of trial and error, here are a few practices I’ve used during customer meetings to maximize this limited and valuable time with a customer.
- Typically, you only have 30 minutes with a customer – longer if you are later in the sales cycle… maybe. I don’t waste a lot of time on “rapport building”. It is in my best interest to get down to business. I’ve never been into forced friendships anyway. I think real relationships just take time to develop no matter how hard you push them. So, there is nothing wrong with jumping right in and getting to business. The rapport gets built as you work together and build trust in each other. It takes time, but it’s more genuine.
- To start off the meeting, I use a pre-planned, pre-rehearsed opening statement to remind them about the good reason they decided to meet with me. I take them through the goal of our meeting and the agenda, both of which I sent before our meeting. I ask if they agree with the plan for our meeting and if they have anything topics they’d like to add to our agenda.
- Throughout the meeting I keep us on track with time checks, marking items off our list and setting next steps.
- I leave about 5 minutes at the end to recap our meeting and action items (this will be covered again in Part 3 of Maximize Customer Meetings).
- I set our next meeting or conversation based on our action items.
Customers appreciate it when we use their time wisely. It is nice to invest 30-60 minutes and see real, tangible outcomes.
Sales Team Meeting Idea:
- Ask your team to come to the next sales team conference call with information about 2 upcoming customer meetings.
- During this meeting, create opening scripts to use to set the tone for a productive meeting that makes helps maximize the time together.
- Rehearse these scripts during the meeting and give each other feedback.
- Assign a Fieldwork Assignment. Ask each rep to use their opening script in those two upcoming meetings and report back to the team on the productivity of the meeting.
Next week we’ll discuss Part 3, After the Meeting. Have a great selling week.
(For more indepth sales team meeting training exercises on topics like this one and many others, subscribe to Meeting to Win. Each week, Sales Managers receive a new 60-minute agenda full of training, exercises, discussion topics and practice drills. Teams can leave their Monday Morning Meetings motivated and equipped. Join us here.)
