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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.

Posted in agenda ideas, agendas, best practice, free sales team meeting topics, gatekeeper, how to have productive sales team meetings, meetings, sales meetings, sales team agenda., sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agenda topics, sales team meeting ideas, tips for meetings | No Comments »

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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Neal Boortz is Outraged. You Should Be, Too.

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Neal Boortz is outraged this morning.  To be fair, no matter which day I choose to write this, I could start my post the same way and, to be fair again, there is a lot of stuff to get outraged about if you enjoy being outraged.  Today’s particular outrage is about a school district here in the Atlanta area spending $400K of federal stimulus money to take 200 teachers to a conference in Hollywood, CA for 4 days of learning and development.  The justification for this includes the idea that the teachers will come back from this trip excited about what they learned and eager to implement what they learned in the classrooms.

This topic made me think about the annual sales meeting that many salespeople just came back from.  January is a hot time for this.  It is typically fair to say that salespeople learn a lot during these annual meetings and do come back excited.  But then what happens? Well, the same thing that will happen to these teachers.  Back home things continue to churn and students need to pass tests, parent conferences need to continue, a failing student needs to be addressed, discipline problems continue, the school play needs to be rehearsed, tests need to be graded and so on.  Before these teachers realize it, they are doing exactly the same things they were doing before they left for the conference and the conference was nothing more than a pep rally and a chance to socialize and sightsee with peers from around the country.  Lfie can get in the way of great intentions after all.

Hopefully what will happen is this instead.  The school system will follow this Hollywood conference with a plan to implement the top ideas from these meetings that will make the most impact on key areas this school district needs to address.  Whether that is increasing graduation rate, implementing more sports programs, raising the SAT test scores or reducing absenteeism.  What is the plan and what is the plan to hold these teachers accountable to bringing back the change that will make a difference?

If you’ve just had your annual sales meeting, what is different in the way you help customers because of the time you invested to attend your meeting?  Some companies follow these up effectively and many, many do not.  Everyone comes back after the company has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and selling time and salespeople have invested selling and family time and …. do the very same things they did before they left.  Sure, they are a little excited, but are also now 4 days behind in their day jobs.  Now it’s catch up time instead of implement-what-you’ve-learned time.

Bottom line, you should be outraged like Neal if your company dragged you half way around the country for a big rah-rah session with no plan to advance, reinforce and apply the valuable lessons and information you absorbed during your meeting.  I know I would be.

(Post brought to you by Jill Myrick of Meeting to Win.  Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting training topics.  Each agenda offers 60 minutes of sales development content along with ideas to reinforce, advance and apply the training in the field.  Join us by subscribing today.)

Posted in discipline, down economy, how to have productive sales team meetings, management tips, meetings, new years resolutions, sales management, sales manager tips, sales meetings, sales team, sales team meeting agenda, sales team meeting agenda topics, sales team meeting ideas, team meeting, tips for meetings | No Comments »

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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Stay “On The Grid” During the Holiday Season

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

It is almost impossible to not “go off the grid” with your prospective customers and customers during the holidays. Everyone is heading to some much needed time off.  You can have a competitive advantage by staying on the grid while your competitors are dropping off.  Here are 5 ways to do it that won’t cut into your much needed and deserved R&R.

1.  Send Happy New Year cards to your clients.  These cards should arrive right before or right after Jan 1st. Your greeting will stand out since it won’t be arriving with the pre-Christmas gifts and cards that get lost in the shuffle or arrive during vacations.  Your New Year’s greeting could include a calendar or some useful information for the new year. 

2.  Send an article or book that is relevant to the current business climate or their current business issues.  They can start the new year thinking about you and gaining some fresh ideas.

3.  Get on their calendar for a January meeting.  The new year is a great time to evaluate the business you did the previous year and set plans for the new year.  Requesting a Jan meeting in December is extremely effective.  Customers want to feel they have a productive Jan set up before they leave for the holidays, also.  Setting up a meeting with a good objective is a good way to help them do this.

4. Help them prepare for new year planning meetings.  If they are a current customer, one way to do this is to send them a slide deck outlining the work and accomplishments in 2009 along with some ideas to continue the good work in 2010.  Your email can start with “Often our clients ask us for a recap of the previous year so they can use it during thier new year planning sessions.  I thought you may also find this helpful.   Please see attached document.  I am happy to walk through the slides with you at your convenience.  Hope it’s helpful as you head into the new year.“  Write it in a way that they could use it with their superiors and in planning meetings.  They will see you as a true partner and you’ll cut their 2010 workload before the year even begins.

5.  Instead of just an “out of office” reply, send a proactive note to your customers and prospective customers several days in advance of your vacation.  Let them know you’ll be out and how they can get in touch with you if appropriate, or at least how to get in touch with someone who can help them in your absence.  They probably will be out, too, but they will have you in mind and feel that you took an extra step to ensure they are taken care of even when you are out.  (It’s a great reason to reach out to them when you return to let them know you are back in the office and move your relationship forward.)

Enjoy your time “off the grid” while a few small efforts will keep you “on the grid”.  Happy New Year!

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Kick-Off to Great Sales Team Meetings – FREE Workshop Download Available

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Sales Managers, do your sales team meetings have “snooze” as the main agenda topic?  It’s not as easy as it looks to plan and execute interesting, interactive sales team meetings.  At Meeting to Win, we believe these meetings should equip your team to compete and win.  If yours aren’t doing that, continue reading….

(At the end of this post, Sales Managers can download a FREE  ”Kick-Off to Great Sales Team Meetings” Workshop Guide.  The guide will help you lead your team through the planning of great sales team meetings as outlined in this article.  Take “SNOOZE” off your agenda!)

sleeping in meeting

To begin having GREAT weekly sales team meetings, don’t try to do it all yourself.  Involve your bright team in the planning and executing.  After all, when done correctly, aren’t they the ones who are supposed to benefit from this time?  If so, they need to own responsibility, also. 

Let’s get started.  Carve out some time to work on your sales team meeting plan WITH your team.  We suggest doing this during your…. you guessed it, weekly sales team meeting.

Before this meeting, consult with some of your team’s natural leaders.  Ask them about the current sales team meetings and how they would improve them.  Let them know you plan to consult with the team on the topic and ask them to take leadership roles in that meeting.  The outcome should be a plan to have more effective sales team meetings that the entire team builds and then executes consistently.

During the meeting, welcome the team and thank them for their time.  Review your plan for the meeting and share the reasons you want to put appropriate effort into improving sales team meetings.  Ask your leaders you consulted with in advance to share their thoughts, also.

Now, it’s time to get to work.

Set a goal for this meeting.  As a team, what do you hope to gain from spending time on this topic?  At the end of the meeting, determine if you achieved that outcome.

For fun, ask each meeting participant to share their best and worst sales team meeting experiences.  Ask them what made those experiences the best and worst.  You’ll have a good starting point on how to move forward.

A very important next step is to set some meeting ground rules.  As a team, create a list of rules everyone should abide by.  We’ve seen the ground rules include (1) be on time, (2) no agenda hi-jacking, (3) everyone problem needs to be introduced with possible solutions and so on.  It is important that this list of ground rules be created and agreed upon by the team, not just the manager.

Now, what should you talk about? Content is critically important for a great sales team meeting.  The content you choose will determine how effective the meeting will meet the objective of equipping the team to compete and win.  Ask the team to share a list of topics they’d like to cover.  Now, figure out where to find information on these topics – guest speakers, books, product specialists, company sales trainer, industry magazines, websites, etc.  These topics will be what you use to build your weekly sales team meeting agendas.  (Meeting to Win provides Sales Managers with new topics and agendas every week!  To subscribe, visit us at Meeting to Win or visit our store at M2W Store.)

Next, as a team, create your next 4 agendas.  Ask different team members to gather topic information and lead sections of the meetings.  Everyone owns parts of the meeting which distributes the work and makes for much more interesting meetings.

Finally, set your team up for a bright sales team meeting future.  It takes effort and its worth it.  As a team, determine how the group will commit to executing productive sales team meetings moving forward.  You’ve done the hard part and planned it. Now, you need to execute.  Maybe each team member can own one month of the year or you can create a sales team meeting task force. Whatever works for your team, plan it and commit to it before you close this topic.

You have the blueprint for moving forward with GREAT sales team meetings.  Get the FREE  ”Kick-Off to Great Sales Team Meetings” Workshop Guide and get started NOW!

 

Post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Founder of Meeting to Win.  Meeting to Win provides sales team meeting resources such as topics, agendas, e-books and consulting.

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10 Tips for Better Weekly Sales Team Meetings in 2009

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Sales Team Meetings – 10 Tips for Winning Sales Team Meetings

Sales Managers can immediately impact their team’s performance and morale by committing to productive and positive weekly sales team meetings. This Monday morning meeting sets the tone for the selling week. At the end of each weekly sales team meeting, each participant should feel more equipped to compete and win. This is an expensive hour when you consider your entire sales team is NOT selling for one full hour. These tips can help you invest that hourly wisely. Your return should be more momentum, better morale and sales success.

Meeting to Win, LLC (www.meetingtowin.com) wants to share 10 tips to help you lead more productive, positive meetings right away. Use these tips or subscribe to Meeting to Win agendas (https://www.meetingtowin.com/subscribe). Either way, commit to having great meetings starting next week.

1. Send an agenda in advance. First of all, this keeps a sales manager accountable to planning a productive meeting instead of just jumping on a weekly call and resorting to the roundtable update approach.
The agenda should change for each meeting. If you send the same template each week, they will stop looking at it. Keep agenda’s fresh and relevant.
When sales people know the manager is being proactive and planning for their meetings, they are more likely to take them more seriously, also.

2. Invite RELEVANT guest speakers. Who could join your sales team call and share information that will help your sales people sell more?
This could be an internal product specialist who could clear up confusion or answer questions about a new product offering.
This could be a customer who could give a short talk on their experience working with your company or team.
This could be someone from your marketing team to share some current market research relevant to your customers.

3. Share ownership for a productive meeting with the entire team. Share meeting planning and executing responsibilities with team members. For example, someone can be the timekeeper, someone can lead an agenda topic, someone can send the agenda out in advance, someone can secure a guest speaker and so on. It’s everyone’s responsibility to use this time wisely.

4. Have a Team Book Club. Continually build business acumen by reading and discussing a current business book as a team. Read the chapter before the meeting and discuss it during the meeting for a set amount of time.

5. Assign pre-work. This doesn’t have to be a huge project, just a small amount of preparation so they can contribute to a successful, helpful sales team meeting. And, again, meetings are always more interesting when more people have input.
Give them an article to read before the meeting.
Ask them to think about a topic and be prepared with their thoughts or ideas on that topic.
Ask them to research something for the sales team.

6. Reinforce recent sales training. Most sales training organizations have reinforcement modules designed for sales managers to use after the formal training. Use these. Each meeting, asks a different sales person to “teach” the next module. This encourages the team to study and practice the sales methodologies and skills that will make them more successful.

7. Have fun. Celebrate even the smallest successes and wins every week.

8. Don’t do a data dump. If administrative things can be shared via email, do so. Give the team a chance to ask questions or make clarifications on something they received via e-mail, but do not dump all this info on them during their meeting.

9. Stick to the allotted time. Enough said?

10. Share Best Practices. Make sure this is on the agenda. Ask one sales person to share something they have tried that is working. They should be able to tell the rest of the team how and why they did it and share any tools that will help someone else try it.

BONUS TIP: Analyze losses. It’s painful, but top sales team do this consistently. Everyone can learn from these discussions.

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