2010 April | Meeting to Win's Blog

Archive for April, 2010

Seth Godin’s Invent a Holiday – An Idea for Sales Teams (Plus: Sales Team Meeting Idea)

Friday, April 30th, 2010

I really enjoy Seth Godin’s insights and ideas. I subscribe to his blog and am often challenged by his ideas. On Valentine’s Day he published a blog post called Invent a Holiday. In practicing proactive sales and sales management over the years, calendaring things has been a critical success factor for me so… I like the idea of holidays or awareness months ( example: Breast CancerAwareness Month - Oct). Take Mother’s Day for example. We should show our mothers how much we appreciate them throughout the year and hopefully you do. I like the idea of taking a day each year to focus on just that. The holiday is a disciplined way to make sure a year doesn’t go by where you don’t do something extra special for your mom.

Just like in business, you have to create a system of focus to keep focus on the important things. Salespeople turn in a weekly activity report because just knowing you have to do the activity doesn’t seem to be good enough. Human beings need a Focus System to stay on task. The activity report is a weekly Sales Activity Awareness Day for sales activity. We, as salespeople, are disciplined to focus on our important sales activity once a week when we celebrate this focus by turning in our activity reports. Just like Mother’s Day, is sales activity any more important on Sales Activity Awareness Day than on any other day? Of course not. It’s just the day we choose to bring some awareness to it.

So, this brings me to my point. As a team, why not create a customer focused day, week or month that customers know about, it goes on the calendar and the entire company celebrates it? We should be celebrating customers every day and make sure you do. In the spirit of putting important things on the calendar, I would use one month per year to focus only on celebrating customers. Here is what would happen that month:

Senior leaders would get on the road with sales reps and visit customers for the entire month.
Sales reps would collect report cards from their customers on how they are meeting the needs they promised to meet upon contract.
Sales reps would do customer analyses to make sure they are meeting the changing needs of their customers.
Every functional department (Marketing, Accounting, HR, etc) would get together to make sure they are creating, promoting and supporting the customers. Each department should have the goal of doing one thing to improve the customer’s experience with their company. (For example, billing could create a simpler invoice, HR could help keep customer service positions filled, etc)
Each day would be a company focus on a top customer – this could be communicated with an email or an intranet video depending on your company’s communication preferences. The entire company would be aware of it’s top 22 customers at month’s end. (I wonder if everyone in the HR department knows the Top 10 customers right now.)

Well, back from “If-I-ruled-the-world Land…”, here is an idea of how to use this invent a holiday concept on your own sales team.

Sales Team Meeting Idea:

As a team, invent a holiday.
Decide what is worth celebrating or creating awareness about.
Decide when it should be and how you will celebrate or create the awareness.
Determine what resources you will need.
Enjoy your new holiday!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Analyze Your Way to Mission-Critical Status

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

How do you become a mission-critical part of your customer’s team? The one that they call to uncover opportunities to improve, solve problems or get results? To become this part, you first have to know what is critical to the mission. As sales experts in our respective fields, it is our job to expose what is critical to the mission and then suggest ways to accomplish those things.

For example, I provide sales team meeting agendas for Sales Leaders. It is my responsibility to demonstrate to sales leaders how a consistent, strategic communication schedule can impact sales performance, team morale, turnover, bench strength and customer satisfaction. I am the expert and I am responsible for teaching and solving.

There are many ways to get to the table or to the point of solving. One very powerful way to get in the door and to the table is by offering to do an Assessment. In my case, I could do a Sales Meeting Assessment. My message to a prospective customer is simply, “As an expert at driving sales performance and important initiatives with sales meetings, I’d be happy to assess the effectiveness of your current sales team meeting strategy. After assessing your current approach, I will return to you the results of my assessment along with opportunities to more effectively use sales meetings to drive performance. The outcomes may be things you can do on your own. If there are areas Meeting to Win can help to improve your sales meetings, we’ll certainly include those options in our report.”

This approach is extremely valuable to a prospective customer (many sales teams even charge for this!) and they rarely say “no”. There is no risk for them to have an expert examine their business and share process improvements. The salesperson conducting the assessment has license to learn every detail of how they handle that process now. The intent must truly be to share ideas, best practices and solutions to improve.

The outcome is very often an active sales cycle for the salesperson and some great ideas to consider for the customer.

Understand the mission, help them reach the goal and you become … mission-critical.

Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting agendas for Sales Managers. This week’s agenda is Tie Your Solutions to Their Goals. If you would like to lead your team through exercises designed to help them become mission-critical to their customers, subscribe today.

Tags: CRM, customer meetings, energize sales team, motivate sales team, troubleshooter
Posted in Account Management, CRM, agenda ideas, best practice | No Comments »

Get Hitched

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

Your products and services – or solutions – meet very important needs of your customers. The more your solutions directly impact their ability to do their business more effectively, the more powerful and important your partnership becomes. Salespeople can hitch their solutions to the most important wagons with a little focus on the right needs.

No matter who you are positioned with in an account, an understanding of the top company goals is useful in the short term and often critical in the long term. In the short term, simply offering a solution they are asking for may be enough to make a sale at a department level. In the long term, much like what we have seen in the past couple of years, spending gets scrutized for one reason or another and any spending not directly tied to the most important goals gets cancelled. Also, salespeople often find themselves in the position of being sold internally by an ally or coach. They have to provide the information and incentive to get their internal ally to fight for their solutions. If that person is armed with the connection to the top goals, the more likely they are to be successful in their interal sales role.

So, we know it’s important, now, how do you do it. Here are some things that you may want to try:

First of all, start high in an organization. The more effectively you can tie your solutions to their unique company goals, the more likely you are to stay high. Even if you get delegated lower during the process, you still have access higher.
Research, research, research. Find out everything you can about what the CEO is focused on accomplishing.
Find out what role your contacts play in the top company goals. For example, pretend your contact is in HR and one of the company’s top goals is the successful launch of a new product for 8% revenue growth this year. How will HR help the company reach this goal? Is it their job to find new sales people? Is it their job to train everyone on the new product? What particular part will they play in this goal? Once you know this you can help them reach their goal which helps the company reach it’s goal.
Demonstrate how you can help them reach these goals more efficiently. Show how the investment with you gives them the gains they need.
Once you are in, monitor your contribution and share it in regular reports and communications. Check in often on progress and make sure you stay aligned should the goals get altered.
Learn to ask questions that get you to the most important goals. You’ll be surprised that often your current contacts actually don’t even know the company’s top goals. You need to learn to ask questions that don’t make them feel stupid yet also help you work toward gathering the necessary information. Simply asking someone “what are your company’s top 3 goals?” may sound like a pop quiz. Use your communication skills to have productive conversations where you both learn if necessary.

Solutions tied to top goals stand the test of time and scrutiny. Get hitched to the right goals for long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.

Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting agendas for Sales Managers. This week’s agenda is Tie Your Solutions to Their Goals. If you would like to lead your team through exercises designed to help them “get hitched”, subscribe today.

Tags: CRM, customer meetings, existing customer, motivate sales team, new customers, sales meeting agenda, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda
Posted in Account Management, CRM, communication, efficient, free sales team meeting topics, how to have productive sales team meetings | No Comments »

Brilliant!

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

I’ve had the privilege as you probably have, too, to meet some very successful salespeople and business owners. Those people that seem to have a magic touch and deliver consistently strong performance and value to their customers. A key to their success was getting to the table in the first place to have the conversations that lead to these strong relationships with customers. They somehow earn their way into the hearts and minds of these customers. How do they do it?

As I have examined and interviewed these people, here are two things that I have found.

First, if you ask them how they do it, they think they know and often they don’t. They very often say “I just build strong relationships” or “I’m not afraid to tell it like it is” or “I kept after them for years”, etc. All things that certainly could contribute.

Now, when I observe these people over years what I really find is that they do something brilliant. They often don’t even realize it’s brilliant and yet it seems to be the trigger for great relationships.

Three examples:

I know one business owner who shares his Decision Grid with his customers and they fill it out together. This one action makes his process transparent to the customer and in one meeting helps this business owner determine if there actually is a decision process and, therefore, a real opportunity. This one 30 minute conversation with a customer early in the sales cycle helps him build trust and pursue real opportunities. Brilliant!

Another sales leader I observe was winning the big contracts left and right in his company. What did he do differently? He had the fastest turnaround time vs. his competitors. Brilliant! He left the customer meeting with his action items and they were done that day. He was a master at coordinating internal resources to meet the needs of the customer. He made everyone work at his pact. Brilliant! He didn’t let time kill any of his deals. His deals flew through the pipeline all because he set the pace for his team and the customer team.

One last example. I know a sales leader whose team has consistently led the company in sales, innovation, top customers and many other categories for over 20 years. What does he do? No matter what the company is doing, he picks one solution to sell. Brilliant! They offer about 40 programs and he and his team put all their focus and efforts around one solution they feel is the most relevant and useful to their customer and they spend all their resources there. Risky? Maybe, but it’s been working.

So, observe the top performers you come in contact with and don’t simply ask them what they do differently, watch them. Figure out what they are doing differently. It is often one brilliant thing that you could repeat in your territory. Go be BRILLIANT!

Meeting to Win recently sent out the Best Practices of Top Performers sales team meeting agenda. Sales teams around the world worked through an exercise to list the brilliant things top performers in their own companies are doing. Right now, those brilliant actions are being replicated across organizations. To experience similar momentum, subscribe to Meeting to Win sales team meeting agendas and elevate your teams to top performer status.

Tags: brilliant, CRM, customer meeting success, motivate sales team, sales team agenda., winning in sales
Posted in Account Management, CRM, best practice, customer meeting, down economy, maximize tools, performance, sales managers, sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agenda topics | No Comments »

We Interrupt This Summer to Bring You…Sales

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

2011 Summer Sales Team Meeting Agenda Series = Summer of Experts.

Join us by becoming a subscriber and open your team’s minds by studying expert sales advice and applying it to your own business. Subscribe HERE.

Summer is right around the corner and the time to start executing your summer selling plan is now. You may have just experienced this on a smaller scale during Spring Break season. Decision makers are out of the office on vacations or entertaining clients at golf tournaments. Spring and Summer can mark tough times for sales professionals who are still trying to move deals forward. The odds of getting all the decision makers involved at the necessary stage are not good during the summer. Each activity gets pushed off until “next week” when someone is “back in the office” and, before you know it, your sales cycles have stretched out. And, salespeople and their teammates are trying to schedule in much needed breaks, also.

It is in everyone’s best interest to keep deals moving through the summer. Customers need solutions, salespeople need sales. The season does not change those truths. So, how can sales professionals enjoy their summer and a few successes at the same time? Here are some actions to take now to close some summer deals.

Look at your pipeline and determine which deals should be closing during the summer.
At your next opportunity with your prospective customers, walk through all the steps they will most likely need to take to make a decision on your solution. Together, build a timeline for when these steps should occur based on when they need a solution in place. This will give you both a timeline to work toward heading into the summer.
With your timeline in hand, acknowledge the challenges of meeting deadlines in the summer months with your customer. Build a calendar that includes everyone’s (salesperson’s team and customer’s team) planned vacations or absences. This way you can stay a few steps ahead on planning.
Make sure that everyone who will be involved in the decision process understands the timeline and the steps in the process.
Consider scheduling a regular update call with your key contacts. Think of yourself as a project manager keeping the team on track to make a decision. Each week should move the deal forward.
Keep your momentum during the summer by working a business development plan. Salespeople have a tendency to take a little break during the summer months. Those that keep up the hard work will gain momentum throughout the summer and into the next selling season. Very often prospects are more receptive during holiday and summer seasons. Take advantage of the lighter mood and begin some great relationships.
Set clear activity and performance goals for the summer months. It is too easy to go with the flow of traffic if you don’t have a better plan. If those around you have slowed down, it is easy to follow their lead. Build a plan to follow and avoid this slow down.
Take your own vacation. You’ll enjoy it more if you’ve been proactive to continue adding to your pipeline and moving your deals throughout the summer. Now, go get that break!

Enjoy a summer filled with sales by building and executing your summer sales plan now.

Post brought to you by Jill Myrick of Meeting to Win, LLC. Become a Meeting to Win subscriber to receive a new sales team meeting agenda every week. This week’s agenda is We Interrupt This Summer to Bring You…Solutions. As a team, you’ll leave this meeting with a solid plan to succeed throughout the summer. You’ll win and your customers will win. What a great summer this could be!

Tags: CRM, cusotmer meeting success, customer meetings, energize sales team, move deals, pre-call planning, prepare for sales call, sales team agenda., winning in sales
Posted in Account Management, CRM, Summer Selling Season, communication, customer meeting, efficient, performance | No Comments »

10 Ways for Sales Managers to Ruin Their Reputation and Lose Their Team’s Respect

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Nice title, huh? This article, although the title may suggest otherwise, is presented in a positive tone. There are actually more than 10 common practices that Sales Managers use that do more to frustrate their teams. Avoiding these practices takes planning and a strategic approach to sales management which is often lacking. Across the board organizations spend way more teaching their salespeople process and strategy than they do for their sales managers. Sales managers are really left to figure it out on their own. So, after polling many salespeople and using my own experience as a salesperson and a sales manager (not that I ever did any of these things!), I thought I would share a list of 10 Ways for Sales Managers to Ruin their Reputations and Lose their Team’s Respect.

1. Hold boring, unproductive or negative sales team meetings. I own Meeting to Win - clearly I’m passionate about this one. It’s a reputation killer!

2. Keep introducting the ”flavors of the month”. A Sales Manager gets an idea from a book, a colleague or divine inspiration. They march in Monday morning with “we are going to start….”. It usually comes with a new report, a task force or, at the very least, additional meetings. It dies in a week with no acknowledgment. It just quits coming up and salespeople learn to stop taking this stuff seriously.

3. Don’t protect selling time. Sales Managers who blindly ablige senior management emergency reports and other fire drills without ever putting up resistance in the protection of selling time are not helping their salespeople succeed. Salespeople begin to see them as the enemy working against their progress.

4. Hire bad team members. The team knows it and it affects the team’s performance and culture immediately.

5. Don’t address disruptive or underperforming reps in a timely manner. The team is watching how the managers address or put up with these things. Managers who address these things early and positively create a culture of performance. The opposite does, well, the opposite.

6. Don’t stand up for the team members. Sales Managers are a bit like parents. Discipline in private, praise in public. Salespeople need an ally, it should be their Sales Manager.

7. Take the credit for the team’s successes. Sales Managers who have successful teams do get the credit, they don’t need to give it to themselves.

8. Pass the blame for the team’s failures. This is an ugly one. Again, Sales Managers are getting the blame even if they try to pass it elsewhere. They just need to own it and fix it.

9. Forget what it’s like to be on the front lines. Sales Managers too often lose the feel for the field. They get too busy to get in the field, too. Sales Managers need to spend 3 days a week in the field with their reps and not lose the feel.

10. Mess up on a customer meeting. Sales Managers should enhance a customer meeting, not ruin hard work. Enough said.

BONUS: A rep just shared this great one with me! Schedule one-on-ones or meetings and then continually cancel and postpone them. The team members are planning around and preparing for these and emailing them to postpone the meeting for an hour or even 10 minutes is disrespectful and rude.

If you are guilty of any of these, now is the time to address it. Your reputation depends on it.

Tags: energize sales team, motivate sales team, sales leadership, sales team agenda.
Posted in CRM, agenda ideas, customer meeting, new managers, performance, sales management, sales manager tips, sales managers, sales meeting agenda, sales meetings, sales team | No Comments »

4 Steps to Creating Powerful, Effective Sales Meetings by Paul McCord (Link to Salesopedia)

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

I received this article today from my Salesopedia subscription. Two terrifying truths jumped out at me immediately.

“Weekly sales meetings have killed more manager authority and respect than probably any other activity a manager engages in with the possible exception of the ride along.”
“They have also driven a great number of high performers to the competition, one of which may be my client Richard who is one of the top 5 sellers in his company’s 300 member sales force.”

Read more about the importance of executing effective sales team meetings in Paul McCord’s article,

4 Steps to Creating Powerful, Effective Sales Meetings.

Enjoy Paul’s insights and direction and start having better meetings this Monday. It is critically important.

Tags: energize sales team, motivate sales team, sales meeting agenda, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agendas, sales team meeting idea, sales teams
Posted in how to have productive sales team meetings, management tips, sales management, sales manager tips, sales managers, sales meeting agenda | No Comments »

17 Best Practices of Top Performers by Kelley Robertson

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

This week’s Meeting to Win sales team meeting agenda is called Best Practices of Top Performing Sales People. We highlight Kelley’s article as a starting point for sales teams to create their own list and close the gap between their own performance and that of the very top performers in their own organizations. Enjoy the article. To get the agenda, subscribe to Meeting to Win now.

17 Best Practices of Top Performing Sales People by KelleyRobertson

Many people wonder what separates a top performing sales person from the rest of the pack. In most cases, it’s because they apply a number of best practices in their daily routine. Here are 17 best practices of top performing sales people.

Read the rest…

Tags: energize sales team, motivate sales team, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agendas
Posted in how to have productive sales team meetings, performance | No Comments »

Work As A Team to Win As A Team

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

Who is on your “team”? By team I mean everyone that helps take care of the customer from suspect stage to account management stage. This could be your proposal people, your billing dept, your sales engineers, your operations team, your customer service representatives and the list goes on. It typically takes many people working together to win, keep and grow customer accounts. How well your team works together is being observed and judged by customers and is a big factor in their decision to work with you or not.

There are many challenges facing your extended team. Everyone has different bosses, people are spread all over the country, they leave the company and have conflicting priorities. How do you pull the team together for the good of the customer?

Start by identifying the team. Make a list of everyone who touches every stage of the sales cycle. List these people or functions by sales cycle stage. Include the role they play in that stage.

Now that you have this chart, figure out how to improve your team work. To get started, list 5 areas of breakdown in your team work. Are proposals often late, do customers have billing issues, is Customer Service unresponsive, are orders delivered late? Take each breakdown one by one and figure out how to address it so customers have a better experience.

Some solutions may include:

Involving an extended team member earlier in the sales cycle.
Making an effort to get to know each other outside a sales cycle.
Including the extended team on sales team meetings occasionally.
Making sure everyone is clear on their role in the customer account.
Creating a customer-focused culture where everyone sells.
Encouraging team leaders to focus on working together.
Creating a communication system across departments.

Work together as a team to win as a team. You’ll enjoy these internal relationships and your customers will be the big winners.

(Meeting to Win provides new sales team meeting agendas every week for Sales Managers who subscribe to the sales meeting agenda service. This Friday, the sales team meeting agenda Work as a Team to Win as a Team will be delivered to our subscribers. Join us and start having better sales team meetings this week.)

Tags: CRM, cusotmer meeting success, energize sales team, motivate sales team, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agendas, sales team meeting idea, sales teams, sales teamwork, team work, work as a team
Posted in Account Management, CRM, agenda ideas, agendas, free sales team meeting topics, performance, sales meeting agenda, sales meetings, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agenda topics, sales team meeting ideas, team meeting | No Comments »

The Worst Case Scenario

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

It seems that when some make the transition from revenue-producing sales rep to sales leader, they forget some very important realities. They no longer want to hear about the realities of the field. They want to call those “excuses”. I admit, I like to look at everything and determine the worst case scenario. This does not bum me out, it actually makes me feel better to have a game plan should the worst case scenario play out. It never does and it still feels good to be prepared.

The reality is that things happen that are disruptive. Some of these things the reps’ own companies do to them, some are economy driven, some are customer driven. Yet, leadership still expects the reps to turn in 8% revenue growth. If you kick a marathon runner in the knee at mile 13, that runner may not beat his previous finishing time. That’s a reality. I don’t believe that sales reps like to “make excuses”. I believe they really want to explain their performance, good or bad. Being able to explain why something happens is a key ingredient in duplicating the good results and avoiding the poor results.

So, I challenge sales leaders to face reality. Among other things, the following is a list of things that ARE disruptive:

Moving territory lines.
Adding or taking away accounts.
Pulling them out of the field for training.
Asking them to complete a whole new set of reports.
Introducing a new CRM.
Giving them a new product to sell.
Reorganizing your sales team.
Changing compensation.

And the list goes on. I challenge sales leaders to face the reality of disruptions instead of pretending like they won’t be disruptions. It’s delusional to think the sales team won’t be distracted. They are human beings, not machines.

Instead, look 30-90 days out and figure out what is coming down the line that could possibly cause distraction for your sales team. Figure out the worst case scenario in terms of how this disruption may impact your sales results. You can’t see everything coming so at least get out in front of what you can see. Get your team together and face reality together. Expect to be distracted and proactively figure out how to sell through it. You’ll reduce distraction and your team will have fewer “excuses”.

Face reality and your reality will be much brighter.

Posted in CRM, discipline, management tips, performance, recession, sales management, sales manager tips, sales managers, sales meeting agenda, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agenda topics, sales team meeting ideas, team meeting | No Comments »

Archive for April, 2010

Seth Godin’s Invent a Holiday – An Idea for Sales Teams (Plus: Sales Team Meeting Idea)

Analyze Your Way to Mission-Critical Status

Get Hitched

Brilliant!

We Interrupt This Summer to Bring You…Sales

10 Ways for Sales Managers to Ruin Their Reputation and Lose Their Team’s Respect

4 Steps to Creating Powerful, Effective Sales Meetings by Paul McCord (Link to Salesopedia)

4 Steps to Creating Powerful, Effective Sales Meetings.

17 Best Practices of Top Performers by Kelley Robertson

17 Best Practices of Top Performing Sales People by KelleyRobertson

Work As A Team to Win As A Team

The Worst Case Scenario

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