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Know Your Risks (Includes Sales Team Meeting Idea)

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

As we continue with Pipeline Health Check week, we want to address risks in pipelines.  If you know your risks, you can reduce the risks or at least manage them more effectively.  As you examine your pipeline this week, check for these risks:

  • A large percentage of the revenue in your pipeline is from one deal.
  • You are not positioned with decision makers in late cycle pipeline opportunities.
  • Your pipeline is heavy on early or late sales cycle deals – no balance.
  • You have not added new “suspect” opportunities to your pipeline consistently.
  • In mid-cycle deals you do not have a crystal clear picture of the decision process and who is involved and in what capacity at each decision point.
  • You haven’t discussed money in mid and late cycle opportunities.
  • You don’t know the competitive landscape in most of your opportunities.
  • Your pipeline does not have at least 3X your sales goal in opportunities.
  • You have deals that have stalled out with no progress forward in a few weeks.
  • You are guessing at the size of opportunities instead of basing it on real diagnosis.
  • You are chasing deals that are not in your company’s sweet spot.

These are just a few of the risks to look for as you examine your pipeline.  Know your risks and take steps to minimize them – the smallest steps can make the biggest difference when pursuing sales performance goals.

Sales Team Meeting Idea:

At your next sales team meeting,

  • Ask your team to bring their pipelines.
  • Go through each of the risks above as a group. 
  • Add risks to the list that apply to your team.
  • Ask each person to honestly assess their pipeline against the final list of risks.
  • As a team, set one action item each person can do to minimize their most dangerous pipeline risk.
  • Plan to follow up as a team and do this exercise again, setting the next action item as you move toward healthier and healthier pipelines.

Meeting to Win provides in-depth sales team meeting agendas with training exercises, practice sessions, discussion topics and ideas to help your sales team sell more.  This Friday’s agenda is the Pipeline Health Check and will lead your team through exercises that will lead to more balanced, healthier pipelines.  Join us and get your own weekly sales team meeting agendas.  Learn more  here.

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How to Run an Effective Sales Meeting by Kelley Robertson

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

I came across this article and liked Kelley’s perspective on effective sales team meetings.  I want to share his insights with our readers.  Enjoy!  (To get new sales team meeting agendas each week visit Meeting to Win.)  

How to Run an Effective Sales Meeting by Kelley Robertson

Sales meetings are a fact of life and business and they are important for a variety of reasons.

-They allow larger companies to address the entire sales team as a group.

-They offer opportunities to provide additional training (product, skills, and technical).

-They help keep your team up-to-date.

-And, they present a tremendous opportunity for your team to connect and develop stronger relationships with each other.

Unfortunately, many sales meetings are unproductive and not nearly as effective as they could be. Here are a few of the most common mistakes people make when scheduling and running sales meetings.

Read the rest….HERE

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Turn Gatekeepers Into Escorts (Plus: Sales Team Meeting Idea)

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

(Each week Meeting to Win provides a 60-minute sales team meeting agenda for our subscribers.  Each week we cover sales and business topics all designed to help salespeople develop as sales professionals, sell more and better serve their customers.  The agendas are packed with exercises, discussions and ways for your team to grow.  This week’s agenda is Turn Gatekeepers Into Escorts.  Visit us at Meeting to Win to learn more.)

How do you turn your current Gatekeepers into Escorts?  Imagine… those currently keeping you from bringing solutions to decision makers actually setting up the meeting for you to do just that.  Seem like a dream?  It’s not…

To do this, sales reps need to think differently about their gatekeepers. First of all, let’s define gatekeeper for the sake of this discussion. 

A GATEKEEPER is anyone who is preventing or hindering you from working with a decision maker.  These people often take the form of a

  1. receptionist,
  2. executive assistant,
  3. RFP committee,
  4. manager in charge of finding a vendor and so on.

To think differently about gatekeepers, consider the important job they do.  RFP committiees are doing the legwork of gathering information to help their company solve a problem or get a result. Executive Assistants are limiting the interruptions of a senior leader focused on his or her company’s key priorities.  An IT Director is using his or her expertise to compare requirements with capabilities before involving decision makers in the business decisions. 

To salespeople who want access to those decision makers, gatekeepers can be seen as nuisances instead of part of an important part of the selling process.  If you are currently being hindered by gatekeepers, here is something to try.

  1. Consider their specific job and the business reasons they may be keeping you from the decision makers.
  2. Respect their position and the insider information a good relationship is sure to provide.
  3. Now, how can you address their needs in a way that will motivate them to escort you and your ideas to the decision makers?   Determine what criteria the gatekeeper needs to satisfy to move you to the decision makers.
  4. Then, share your desire to meet with those making and impacted by the buying decisions.  Let the gatekeeper know why (it’s got to be for their benefit, not yours) and ask how you can work together to get them comfortable and motivated to bring this solution to decision makers.  Figure out how to help them do their job and ultimately make them look great.
  5. Now you are working together and you are actually helping them succeed in their gatekeeper role.

Gatekeepers do serve a purpose and are not always easy to deal with.  They sometimes abuse their power, make poor decisions and often don’t seem to have the company’s best interest in mind.  Teach them how to bring great solutions to their company by partnering with them instead of trying to run them over.  You’ll be more efficient and enjoy the process more.

 

Sales Team Meeting Idea:

At your next sales team meeting, ask each team member to identify the gatekeepers in each of their pipeline opportunities.  Figure out the important role they play in the overall decision process.  Then, figure out how each rep can help them do their gatekeeper job more effectively so the deal can move forward to the real decision makers.

At the end of your meeting, each rep should have a clear gatekeeper strategy for one deal in their pipeline.

For more in depth exercises each week, subscribe to Meeting to Win sales team meeting agendas by visiting us here.  The next agenda is Turn Gatekeepers Into Escorts (delivered Friday, February 12th, 2010).

To download the Sales Team Meeting Agenda (60 Minutes), Turn Gatekeepers Into Escorts, visit our Store here.

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5 Ways to Get a Return on Your Time Investment in the Annual Sales Meeting (Plus: Sales Meeting Idea)

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

(Make sure to check out the Sales Meeting Idea at the bottom of this post.)

This week we wrote about annual sales meetings that many companies invest in each year.  The problem with many is that the reps get back to the field and there is no post-meeting plan – or support – to implement any new ideas, training or on-going focus.  The excitement generated by the fancy meeting is not sustainable and all the company has left are the bills from the party. 

If your company has made little effort to bring the annual sales meeting ideas back to the territories and customers, there are things you can do to ensure return on the investment you made.  In life we ultimately take responsibility for our own success and, in the case of salespeople, the success of our customers, also.  You’ve made a significant investment of one of your precious resources – your time.  Now, it’s time to get a return on that investment.

5 Ways to Get a Return on Your Investment of Time in the Annual Sales Meeting:

1.  Don’t try to do everything.  Pick 1 or 2 ideas, best practices or skills learned during the meeting.  Figure exactly where you can try those things each week.  Practice your 1 or 2 new things each week until they become habit.  Ask a co-worker to hold you accountable or put the action on your calendar.  Pick a follow-up date to see what results you have seen from implementing the new actions.

2.  Ask your Sales Manager if your team can devote 10-15 minutes of each sales team meeting to new ideas, best practices or training from the annual sales meeting.  The team can choose 1-3 things that they believe can make the biggest impact on the team’s success.  Each week a different member of the team is responsible for bringing a discussion or exercise to support the focuses from the annual sales meeting.

3.  If you heard helpful information from your company’s CFO, Marketing Officer, CEO or Trainer, invite them as a guest speaker to an upcoming team sales meeting.  Be prepared to go deeper on their area of expertise to apply it to helping customers.  These internal resources can help you help your customers more effectively.

4.  If there was a new initiative or training program that is being contradicted in the field, bring that to the attention of sales management.  This happens often as different departments have competing goals.  For example, a client of mine spent a considerable amount of time and money on sales training designed to help reduce discounting.  The behavior was rampant and cut into their margins drastically.  The training was delivered and everyone left with solid skills to reduce discounting.  Almost as soon as they got back in the field, Marketing launched a new product and brought it to market at a 40% discount!  All the marketing materials, sales scripts and contests were focused on selling as much as they could right away using the 40% discount as the main sales tool.  This is absurd …and really not that unusual.  As a sales rep, you can respectfully raise this concern with your sales manager and at least get the conversation going while getting some direction in the midst of contradictory messages.

5.  Hopefully your annual sales team meeting provided an opportunity for you to get to know peers from other parts of the country and even the world.  Choose 2 reps from outside your immediate team and commit to staying in touch with them.  Put a call to them on your calendar monthly or quarterly and discuss best practices, ideas and customers.  Best practices have a way of staying in the territory where they are discovered.  If you take one or two top best practices from one or two other territories you will have a competitive edge and more successful customers.  Bring these ideas to your own team after  you learn them and the whole team has an edge. 

So, after years of annual sales team meetings which, by the way, are exciting and fun and usually filled with great learning opportunities, these are the top 5 ways I’ve learned to get an amazing return on my investment.  I hate things that waste my time – with these practices the annual sales meeting never did.

Good luck!

SALES MEETING IDEA: 

  1. Ask your team to read this post before your next sales team meeting. 
  2. During the meeting, as a team, choose 2 things from this list or other actions you can take to bring your annual sales meeting back to the field. 
  3. Decide what results you are looking for by implementing the changes.  Be specific about the results you are looking for.  If you learned new skills to negotiate price, you might want your result to be lowered average discount.  Pick the specific number so you will know if you are moving the needle or not.
  4. Then, pick a follow-up date to check your results. 
  5. At the next sales team meeting following that date discuss the results and everyone’s experience trying the new skills or ideas.  Decide how to move forward.

Hopefully, your team will experience actual behavior change by practicing the new skills or ideas in the field and your return is worth the investment.  Happy Selling.

(Post brought to you by Jill Myrick of Meeting to Win. Meeting to Win provides sales team meeting agendas for Sales Managers who want to equip their teams to win.  Subscribe by visiting us at:  http://meetingtowin.com/)

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Troubleshooters Gain 100 Selling Hours in 2010

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

(To get a Sales Team Meeting Agenda and lead your team through a Troubleshooters exercise, download Troubleshooters from our STORE now.)

What could you do with 100+ ADDITIONAL selling hours per year? I did the math on this a few years ago and since then have been committed to solving nagging little troubles that arise.  Let me explain.

Often a sales rep will face a recurring and nagging trouble such as invoice issues, late deliveries, collections, implementation schedule conflicts and other customer service/post-sale issues.   Because of my own frustration with these things, I’ve added up the minutes I spend on these issues in a typical sales week.  Believe it or not, 2 hours is a low average.  And, more eye-opening is that it tends to be the same trouble over and over again.  So, this could be a frustration or … an opportunity. 

What if I solved that ONE trouble and gained 2 hours per week back in my selling week?  I chose to make solving that one trouble a priority.  Even when I wasn’t able to completely make it go away, I was able to drastically reduce the time I spent on it each week.  The hard part was to stop and take the time to find a solution instead of just living with it.  What I got was over 100 hours of additional selling time that year – and, in most cases, happier customers and reduced frustration every day.   Everyone wins!

So, quit living with that recurring frustration and get your life back – or at least 100 hours of it.

(This post brought to you by Meeting to Win, provider of sales team agendas for Sales Managers.  Troubleshooters agenda comes out this Friday.  Join us and lead your team through an exercise to take back 2 hours per week per salesperson.  If you have 8 salespeople on your team times 2 hours per week times 50 weeks per year you get an ADDITIONAL 800 SELLING HOURS PER YEAR for your team.  It’s worth the time to solve problems.)

(To get a Sales Team Meeting Agenda and lead your team through a Troubleshooters exercise, download Troubleshooters from our STORE now.)

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Communicate First

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

(Post brought to you by Jill Myrick of Meeting to Win.  Meeting to Win provides sales team meeting agendas and topics to our subscribers.  To see subscription options, click here.)

Communication seems to be the common theme in any successful relationship – parent and child, husband and wife, co-worker and co-worker, boss and employee. The most successful salespeople become masters of communication. Before you can master effective communication, it’s OK to … just communicate. If there is a relationship in your life that is suffering or just feels vulnerable (customer, employee, etc), first just communicate. Here’s the powerful part – to communicate you have to be there. You aren’t communicating my sitting in your office wondering about the problem. You have to pick up the phone, spend some time with them – just reach out.

Spend the time on the relationships you care about and communication will happen.  Mastering effective communication can happen over time and even then….you’ve got to be there to do it.

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Pull Up Your Anchors – The Sea Awaits

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Being a successful salesperson takes unbelieveable self-discipline.  It is a job that requires proactive activity to move forward.  At the same time, there are enough things to simply react to that a salesperson can stand still instead of move forward.  I am in the process of writing a sales team meeting agenda to help our subscribers identify their anchors and then figure out how to pull them up occassionally so they can move forward into the sea of opportunity that exists for them.   I thought I’d share the concept in a blog post, also.

How can you tell if you have anchors?  Here are a few questions to answer:

  • Have you identified a new problem to solve for your current clients?
  • Have you presented new ideas and solutions to help them meet their goals?
  • Does your pipeline grow and move at a good pace?
  • Have you added new customers, new contacts and new referral partners to your client list in the past year?
  • Are your sales growing?

If you answered “no” to any of those questions, you may need to find and pull up your anchors so you can move forward and grow your business.  Anchors are the things you are doing instead of developing and expanding your business.

To get started, think about everything you do in a week to simply maintain, or not lose, your current business.  These are your anchors.  Examine those activities closely and determine how to use those to grow your business or how to delegate them to a capable associate with different responsibilties (customer service, etc).  Anchors can be good sometimes.  Occassionally it makes sense to stop, drop your anchor and get ready to move forward again.  Just don’t sit there too long. 

Now, replace your anchors with business development activities.  Your ship will be sailing again before you know it. 

Pull up your anchors – the sea awaits.

 

Post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Owner of Meeting to Win, LLC.  Join our growing community of subscribers for weekly sales team meeting topics in a 60-minute format.  Agendas include practical exercises, practice sessions, discussion topics and leadership opportunities.  Grow your sales with Meeting to Win.

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Move Your Deals Along

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Real quick – here are two tried and true techniques for moving deals through – or out – of your pipeline.

Post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Owner of Meeting to Win. Get next week’s sales team agenda by joining Meeting to Win.

For a moment, forget YOUR sales process and map out your client’s buying process (if they have one). Some clients are more experienced at purchasing than others. Ask them, “how do you typically go about deciding which [blank] to purchase?” You’ll know by their answer if you need to adjust your selling process to their buying process or if you need to help them develop a buying process. Either way, you now have a map to your destination – huge!

Then, be the guide. Always make sure they know the next 2-3 things they should do – and when they should be done – as they assess your product or service so “they can make the best possible decision”. Keep them moving toward the destination, also.

Create and follow your map, expect detours, but most importantly, take your prospective client with you. You both have the same map. If one strays from the journey, it can be addressed much more gracefully than if you never confirmed you both had the same trip in mind.

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