Thanks to FSI for such a great event, Making Sales Meetings Count.

Jill Myrick was our special guest in Friday’s Office Hours. Our discussion was on how to hold high impact sales meetings. (Based on her module: Great Sales Team Meetings, 5 Best Practices.) She kicked the discussion off with a review of the five best practices:

1.Sharing ownership across the team
2.Setting agendas
3.Resisting data dumps
4.Respecting the clock
5.Scoring meetings

The participants shared experiences about good and bad sales meetings—and ideas to avoid bad sales meetings. There were several key areas generating a lot of discussion. The first … Read the rest at Future Selling Institute…

Spend 20 minutes and get the Top 5 Best Practices for Productive Sales Team Meetings.

Then, download all 15 from Future Selling Institute and Meeting to Win.

Enjoy ALL your future sales team meetings by implementing these top practices.

This was shared by a connection on LinkedIn – enjoy!

Less Time + More Meaning = Better Meetings

(Competitive Solutions, Inc)

The pre-work for this week’s Meeting to Win sales team meeting agenda includes two articles by S. Anthony Iannarino of The Sales Blog.

•  11 Ways to Guarantee Your Spot in the Bottom 80% of Salespeople and
• 5 More Ways to Ensure Your Place in the Bottom 80% of Salespeople .

Mr. Iannarino writes an insightful blog and was kind enough to let us use his insights into the bottom 80% of sales performers.  Read the articles, add to the list and decide where you want to rank. 

To get a sales team meeting agenda that leads your team through this valuable exercise, subscribe before Friday!  The agenda goes out at 6am ET.  Hope you can join us in the TOP 20%.

I am finally reading Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.   I’ve only been carrying it around for 2 years and, yesterday, on a flight read the first half.  The concept of 10,000 hours is one of the many pages I’ve dog eared.  This is the concept with supporting examples that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert and a stand-out.  I’ve always been a believer that experience counts in sales.  Think about how much time you actually spend in front of a customer practicing your trade – 10 hours/week if you’re lucky?  How long would it take to gain 10,000 hours of practice?  19 years?  25 years? 

YIKES! 

So, if you want to be an expert, you have to find more practice time.  Here are some ideas:

• First of all, use your weekly sales meeting as a one-hour practice session. – 1 hour/week (Who saw that coming?)
• Role play your upcoming customer encounters with a team member or manager before the customer encounter. -  2 hours per week
• Spend time pre-call planning – opening statements, questions, objection responses, etc – 2 hours per week
• Take one sales training class per year. – 16 hours per year
• Spend 2 more hours per week with customers than you do now.  – 2 hours per week
• Regularly attend a customer meeting with a peer to observe them.  – 2 hours per month

So, adding all of this to your current 10 customer hours per week, you’ll be at 18 hours per week which would put you at expert status in half the time as your peers.  My math shows 10 years (which is how long it seems to take in any field – music, technology, sports). 

I love this concept because it means you have control over how you stack up against your peers in the marketplace.  Invest time in your trade and it pays off. 

Sales Team Meeting Idea: 

• As a team, ask each person to calculate their own individual sales practice hours.  Just use number of years of experience, add in training hours and ask each team member to come up with their number.
• Now, as a team, figure out how to get an additional 5-10 hours per week of sales practice. 
• Commit to getting more practice and then track your performance against other sales teams in your own company.  What results do you expect?

Enjoy working on your 10,000 hours.

Most sales team have a “sales process”. This is a set of steps they take to help the customer make a good decision about their products and services. It typically goes from suspect stage to close stage of the sales cycle. Often these sales processes are written in a very salesperson focused way. They seem to have the goal of “closing” the customer and the worksheets and notes associated with each step are carefully guarded and most certainly never shown to the prospective customer.

In this approach, a sales process is something done TO the customer instead of WITH the customer.

What if salespeople took a different approach and invited their prospective customer into the process? What if salespeople re-wrote the sales cycle steps with the goal of helping the customer make the best possible decision for them?  Maybe it is called a Decision Process instead of a sales process?

When a company hires a consulting firm, the consulting firm typically has a process they use on each engagement to understand the customer and then suggest and execute solutions to meet their clients needs. These solutions are typically repeatable based on the diagnosis.  This is much of what salespeople do, but salespeople differ in the fact that they try to keep their process a secret.

Having a tried-and-true, repeatable process builds confidence in customers. Salespeople might want to consider sharing their process and invite the customer to take each step with them. They could share their reports and forms along the way. Along the way, making sure to stay true to their promise of helping them make good decisions and then, together, document and demonstrate it throughout the process. This builds confidence and trust in the salesperson and the process.

To build trust, move an opportunity along a decision process with your customer.  They will get on the offense with you instead of on the defense against you.

Sales Managers , To get sales team meeting agendas on this topic and many others, subscribe to Meeting to Win.  We’d love to work with you and your team!

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Sales Team Meeting Idea – Sales Performance Book Club

We at Meeting to Win are on a mission to end boring sales team meetings.  Boring sales team meetings put sales teams to sleep right at the beginning of the selling week when they should be at their very best.  The last thing salespeople should have to do is recover from their sales team meeting so they can be productive each Monday.  As part of our mission, we want to share a sales team meeting idea for Sales Managers who share our passion. 

Sales Team Meeting Idea – Sales Performance Book Clubs

As a team,

Choose a business or sales book from Amazon.com (choose your own or subscribe to Meeting to Win and follow along with our quarterly Sales Performance Book Club – includes Discussion Guide and Chapter Exercises).  Cover one or two new chapters each week during your weekly sales team meeting.  Assign the chapters to the members of the team.  Each week give them 20 minutes of the agenda to lead the team on that chapter’s topic. 

They can:

• Lead a discussion on the information in the chapter.
• Ask the team to apply the lessons to their own business.
• Practice skills or ideas from the chapter.
• Pull one or two key lessons from the chapter.
• Set one action item based on the work done during this meeting.
• Get creative – give them the chance to do whatever they want with the chapter.  You’ll see a new side of some team members.

Meeting to Win provides Sales Performance Book Club discussions each quarter as part of our Sales Meeting Agenda Subscription.  We cover one new book each quarter.  Next one, Mind of the Customer, starts in April 2010.  Join us by subscribing today.

Join the MISSION TO END BAD SALES TEAM MEETINGS by having motivating sales team meetings that inspire your team to perform.  Everyone wins!

Post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Owner of Meeting to Win.  Meeting to Win provides Sales Team Meeting Agendas PLUS for Sales Managers who want to lead great sales team meetings.

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.

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. 

So, now I am getting inspiration from beer ads!  The ad says that fortune favors the bold and it supports the Meeting to Win message this week about Playing to Win instead of Playing to NOT Lose. 

Top performers take risks.  They risk losing deals or entire accounts by speaking up when clients are making bad decisions.  They hold their ground during negotiations.  They challenge a competitor’s offering.  They demonstrate their value and then demand the right price.  They walk away from bad deals.  They get to decision makers.  They risk offending gatekeepers.  They ask their referral network to make introductions.  They challenge strategy.  They point out problems.  They share solutions.  They say no to non-selling activities.  They care more about results than padded activity reports and inflated pipelines.  They call higher in organizations. 

Fortune favors the bold.  Take a risk today – and tomorrow – and the next day.  Play with passion. 

Just Sell quote from Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), 26th president of the United States on being bold.

(Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting agendas for Sales Managers who want to lead inspiring sales team meetings.  Join us by subscribing today. Upcoming agendas include Playing to Win or Playing to NOT Lose, Work as a Team to Win as a Team, Lost in Translation, System Based Selling and Create Better Buying Experiences.)