(This Friday the Meeting to Win Sales Team Meeting Agenda, 10 Things You Don’t Know, will be delivered to all our subscribers. We are focused on treating prospective customers AND existing customers like prospective customers. Get a new Sales Team Meeting Agenda EVERY Friday by subscribing to Meeting to Win Sales Team Meeting Agendas today.)
Most sales reps get to enjoy some long-term customer relationships. Too often sales reps take these customers for granted and settle into an account management mode. Account management can mean many positive things, but in this case, we’ll call it account maintenance. It is not enough to just maintain an account. Your customer signed on for more than that. This week’s Meeting to Win theme is treating existing customers like prospective customers by helping them identify and secure solutions to their problems and tools to get them results.
In our 10 Things You Don’t Know article, we suggested several ways to treat these existing customers like hot prospects. Here is another way.
Get a Fresh Set of Eyes on an Existing Account
Ask a team mate to coffee. Ask them to review your clients’ website before meeting with you. Ask them to pretend this client was a target account that they were trying to acquire as a client. Then get together with them for coffee and ask their initial ideas for pursuing this client. Then, tell them everything you know about the account, who you know at the account, your theories on what you don’t know and your history with them. Now, ask them what you are missing. Find out how they would move forward to help this client.
Guaranteed you’ll walk away with a fresh perspective on an old account. You and your client win when you take a fresh look at their business.
Sales Team Meeting Idea:
- In your next sales team meeting, choose 1 existing account on the team that could use a fresh perspective. (Send an email to the team and ask them to nomimate their own accounts.)
- Choose one and let the team know the account name.
- Ask the team to research the account before the meeting.
- Ask the account owner to send a one-page overview of the account – what they know, who they know, history, etc.
- During the meeting, ask the Account Owner to share a 5 minute overview of the account that was not included in the pre-work.
- Ask the team to be the “fresh eyes” and share new ideas and perspective on the account.
- At the end of the hour, get a list of all the new ideas for the Account Owner.
- Account Owner should share what they will try from the list of new ideas.
Fieldwork Idea:
- Choose teams of 3 and, over the course of the next 3 weeks, each team should spend one hour per rep on one account per rep doing the same thing.
- Choose one rep’s account each week and get together for coffee, if possible. If not, do this on the phone.
- Each person on the team should end up with a list of fresh ideas and perspectives on one exisiting account.
- Get back together during a sales team meeting conference call and each rep should share the outcomes of gaining a fresh perspective on their exisiting account.
- What lessons did the team learn?
Enjoy the Fresh Eyes exercise. Join Meeting to Win to get interactive sales team meeting agendas for your sales team every week. We’d love to work with you!
