When I had the privilege to represent Franklin Covey’s Helping Clients Succeed sales training program in the marketplace, I realized something life-changing.  The Consultants who shared the content always shared the fact that sales professionals needed to be effective communicators and, so much of any sales training program, is teaching them to be just that.  A salesperson must first elicit information and then, using that information, make a compelling case for their products or services.  Up until that point I had thought of myself as a salesperson, not a communicator.  A powerful clarification on my real job. 

I answered the phone call of a salesperson this week.  The timing was perfect since this Friday’s Meeting to Win agenda is Masters of Communication.  This call demonstrates exactly why sales professionals need to focus on their communication skills daily.  First of all, this salesperson was clearly surprised to catch me “live” at 6:30pm.  From the sound of it, he fully expected to get voicemail and probably had a good plan for that outcome.  Then, because I am nice to salespeople, I said that I had about 2 minutes when I was asked if I had some time to talk.  I had something on the stove and 2 minutes was even pushing it.  Again, I caught this salesperson by surprise by giving him any time at all.  Then, for the next two minutes this salesperson shared information about their service and used the phrase “in essence” about 10 times.  (Let me say that many of my early sales calls could have been examples in blog posts just like this one!)  The problem is that I don’t remember the service or the benefits because I was distracted by the fact that he seemed caught off guard and used this filler phrase over and over.  I felt like it was merciful to end the call nicely. 

There are some powerful communication lessons from this short call. 

• First of all, be prepared for voicemail or live person. 
• Have a clear reason to call that could be compelling to the person you are calling.
• Have a goal for the call and share the goal with the person you’ve called. 
• With a plan, the need and, therefore, use of filler words or phrases diminishes.
• Eliminate jargon, cliches and lingo.
• Record your calls and listen to them.
• Role play every scenario you could encounter with team mates and help each other.
• Practice your “elevator pitch” every chance you get.  Be able to nail this in any situation.

Becoming a master takes practice.  Look for and create opportunities to practice.  When that top prospect answers the phone finally, you want to be ready.

To get sales team meeting topics like Masters of Communication and many others, subscribe for weekly sales team meeting agendas from Meeting to Win.

Sales Team Meeting Idea:

Using the scenario I shared above, ask each salesperson to role play catching a prospective client “live” who says they only have 2 minutes to talk.  What do you say in those 2 minutes?  What is the goal of your 2 minute call?  Ask each person to do the role play and ask the team for feedback.  After this meeting, everyone will be prepared for one more scenario they may encounter.

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.

I always love to share great meeting advice I come across in my reading. Here is some sound advice from Salesopedia’s newsletter this week.

13 Ideas to Run Engaging Meetings

Enjoy!

It’s a busy selling season for most sales professionals.  Right around the corner could be a tougher selling environment as everyone’s kids are getting out of school and the summer vacation pace kicks in.  Sales reps have about 60 selling days this summer and, with all the vacations, etc, it’s probably more like 45.  45 little days to make some sales!   Last week, we shared some ideas to proactively sell more during the summer months. That was directed at sales people.  THIS is directed at their Sales Managers. 

Sales Managers, drop everything you are doing right now.  Make it top priority to remove any barriers to selling your salespeople are facing.  What is your company asking them to do that is hindering them from seeing customers?  What are their “selling hours”?  Is everyone clear they are not to be disturbed during those hours?  What is being asked of them beyond winning business?  Examine each and every one of those activities to determine how they benefit the customers and the sales reps.  If the benefits don’t outweigh the loss of sales time, get it off their to-do lists. 

Make it clear to sales people that their #1 job is to sell.  Not to fill out reports or train other sales people or put together marketing brochures or babysit implementation or learn their new CRM or join every internal conference call they are invited to or return internal calls during selling hours or, or, or… the list goes on. 

You’ll see from the activities I listed above that there are many useful, valuable activities a sales rep could be doing.  Even positive activities, such as training a new sales rep, get in the way of their selling time. 

The advice here?  Be vigilant in regards to selling time. Protect it fiercely.  It won’t matter what else you could be doing if your team doesn’t have the sales numbers.

If you need some visual help to protect selling time, Just Sell has some great Sales Day Calendars. Visit them here.

Join Meeting to Win for the Summer of Momentum.  Deal Makers Series begins June 4th. Subscribe now and we’ll lead your team on an exciting 5-week adventure.  5 Weeks, 8 Deals, Unlimited Momentum!  Subscribe here.

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.

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.

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.)

(This week’s Meeting to Win focus is on Playing to Win instead of Playing to NOT Lose.   Meeting to Win provides a new, fresh sales team meeting agenda every week for our Subscribers.  Start having productive sales team meetings that result in superior sales performance with Meeting to Win.)

For some reason, there is often a sense of comfort when a prospective client asks us to do or provide something – see a demo, send me information, etc.  We believe we have a solution that may meet their needs and we take their request as a sign that they may also believe that.  As sales reps, happy to stay engaged with this prospect, we march off to provide the requested information.  This prospective client may very well want this information and have a real plan to evaluate our solution and actually make a go/no-go decision on purchasing from us or not. 

On the other hand, they may be making this request for any number of other reasons – and we may be playing along for any number of reasons.  Those reasons can include:

• They are too nice to tell you that have no intention of spending a dime with you.
• They are busy and the fastest way to get rid of you is to send you on an errand.
• They are really good at kicking the tires, but have no history of actually buying. 
• They stay in the eternal sales cycle never actually moving forward on anything.  Professional window shoppers exist in every company.
• They are afraid if they tell you “no” that you will keep trying to sell them.  No one enjoys being on the receiving end of this tactic.
• Your pursuit makes them feel important (ugly truth alert!).
• They think they have some power to make this decision.  Meanwhile, someone else is actually making the decision at some other level.
• We feel “safe” to simply stay engaged in the sales cycle.  We have something to report on our activity tracker, in our pipelines and during our team meeting updates.  We’ve bought another week of activity.
• You look so happy when they ask you for something.

Those just a few of the reasons sales reps are asked to run these errands.  How do sales reps stop being gophers?  One way is to lay out the next few steps or commitments on both sides.  Next time you are asked to run an errand, ask what decision they plan to make once you provide the requested information and by when.  For example, if they ask to see a demo of your software.  Find out what they hope to gain from the demo (the demo may not be what they even need) and what decision they plan to make upon seeing the demo (no-go, take the next step, involve other decision makers, etc) and by when they plan to make the decision (is there even a timeline?). 

It feels “safe” to stay engaged and really….it’s a collosal waste of time.  Stop playing it “safe” and start helping your clients make decisions that will ultimately help their businesses succeed.  Get commitments before you run the errand – everyone wins when you have an efficient process. 

(This week’s Meeting to Win focus is on Playing to Win instead of Playing to NOT Lose.   Meeting to Win provides a new, fresh sales team meeting agenda every week for our Subscribers.  Start having productive sales team meetings that result in superior sales performance with Meeting to Win.)

I’ve had many conversations lately about movement in the marketplace.  Personally, I’ve been taking calls all week from business leaders moving forward on initiatives they’ve been sitting on for months.  Customers are making moves, looking for solutions and ready to move forward.  I love it!  I can feel it in the air. 

This week our focus has been on treating our existing customers like the gold that they are.  Salespeople need to be proactive to ensure they stay part of the customer team as they forge ahead.  One way to do that is to be visibly accountable.  This means that salespeople need to proactively manage themselves so the client doesn’t have to.  There are a few ways to do this.

First of all, set up a process for regular business reviews.  I believe these should be conducted quarterly and formally.  This means there should be a formal agenda that covers:

• A review of the original scope of work.
• The actual scope of work – what’s changed (something always does!) and what adjustments have been made.  This topic ensures everyone is on the same page with the way the partnership has evolved.
• The successes and shortfalls.  How to make the most of the successes and how to adjust to fix the shortfalls.
• An updated Needs Analysis. Find out what has changed in their business, priorities, etc. Uncover new opportunities.
• Next steps/Action Items

Customers should leave these business reviews feeling great about their investment with you.  They don’t need to micromanage the partnership, you are doing that for them.

Secondly, get to know new people in the account regularly.  Ask to speak to people who are impacted by or work with your solutions.  Find out what they like, what they don’t, etc.  Make sure they have your contact information.  You are probably the only one talking to all involved!  You will have an amazing perspective and be able to bring useful ideas to the table based on these relationships.  Not to mention, your name will be mentioned in many conversations as if you are part of the team!

Then, provide regular emailed updates to senior decision makers.  Often, once an account is won, the more senior decision makers move on to the next priority leaving functional people to manage the relationship.  Often, the salesperson’s relationship with the real decision makers is harder to maintain and grow.  To keep developing that relationship, send an update once a month or every 6 weeks hitting the highlights of recent events and successes.  (You may be amazed at the places these emails will get forwarded.) They will appreciate it, feel informed and see you as a true partner and you’ll keep developing this important relationship.

Another way to stay visibly accountable is to put your bosses in front of the client regularly.  Bring them to quarterly business reviews or other meetings.   Make sure the client sees that your senior leadership team is aware of the work your companies do together.  They will feel supported and important when they see the team behind you. 

Demonstrate to your clients how important they are by holding yourself accountable in plain sight.  They will see you as a valuable team member who takes initiative and ownership of results.  You’ll be a dream employee they won’t want to see go. 

To get sales team meeting agendas designed to develop your sales team and accelerate sales performance, visit Meeting to Win (http://www.meetingtowin.com/) and subscribe for weekly agendas.  We love to work with Sales Managers who see the value of investing in their teams!

(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!