We are in the middle of our Maximizing Customer Meetings Sales Team Meeting Agenda series.  To enhance the series, we’ve called on some top selling experts to share their strategies for maximizing customer meetings.  This post is brought to us by Mary Donato, President at Applied Principles, a sales and marketing professional services firm that helps Fortune 1000 companies achieve sales and marketing excellence.

(To subscribe to receive weekly sales team meeting agendas like Maximizing Customer Meetings, visit us HERE.)

Pre-Call Planning for Success

By Mary Donato

Every salesperson would like to have more appointments with more decision-makers. The reality is, these are relatively rare events—particularly with regard to the C-suite.

So once you do get that all-important meeting set up, how much time do you spend preparing for it? The majority of sales calls are won or lost before the salesperson even steps into the client’s office. This is due to the amount of time spent planning for the call. Pre-call planning is one of the most critical steps before any important client meeting. It can take 15 minutes, or even days, depending upon the complexity and importance of the business to your company and goals.

In spite of its critical importance, pre-call planning is a relatively simple endeavor. Here are six steps to incorporate into your own planning process:

Read the rest…

(This Friday Meeting to Win continues a 3-week series called Maximize Customer Meetings – Before, During and After.  To join us, subscribe here.)

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As we discussed in our recent post, Maximize Customer Meetings, Part 1: Before the Meeting, customer meetings are the goal of most of our sales activity. Those meetings launch sales cycles, move deals along and turn opportunities into signed deals.  It makes sense that we spend time preparing for these and executing them effectively.

We’ve already discussed best practices before the customer meeting.  After years of trial and error, here are a few practices I’ve used during customer meetings to maximize this limited and valuable time with a customer.

• Typically, you only have 30 minutes with a customer – longer if you are later in the sales cycle… maybe.  I don’t waste a lot of time on “rapport building”.  It is in my best interest to get down to business.  I’ve never been into forced friendships anyway.  I think real relationships just take time to develop no matter how hard you push them.  So, there is nothing wrong with jumping right in and getting to business.  The rapport gets built as you work together and build trust in each other.  It takes time, but it’s more genuine.
• To start off the meeting, I use a pre-planned, pre-rehearsed opening statement to remind them about the good reason they decided to meet with me. I take them through the goal of our meeting and the agenda, both of which I sent before our meeting.  I ask if they agree with the plan for our meeting and if they have anything topics they’d like to add to our agenda. 
• Throughout the meeting I keep us on track with time checks, marking items off our list and setting next steps.
• I leave about 5 minutes at the end to recap our meeting and action items (this will be covered again in Part 3 of Maximize Customer Meetings).
• I set our next meeting or conversation based on our action items.

Customers appreciate it when we use their time wisely.  It is nice to invest 30-60 minutes and see real, tangible outcomes.

Sales Team Meeting Idea:

• Ask your team to come to the next sales team conference call with information about 2 upcoming customer meetings. 
• During this meeting, create opening scripts to use to set the tone for a productive meeting that makes helps maximize the time together.
• Rehearse these scripts during the meeting and give each other feedback.
• Assign a Fieldwork Assignment.  Ask each rep to use their opening script in those two upcoming meetings and report back to the team on the productivity of the meeting.

Next week we’ll discuss Part 3, After the Meeting.  Have a great selling week.

(For more indepth sales team meeting training exercises on topics like this one and many others, subscribe to Meeting to Win.  Each week, Sales Managers receive a new 60-minute agenda full of training, exercises, discussion topics and practice drills.  Teams can leave their Monday Morning Meetings motivated and equipped.  Join us here.)

I had the opportunity to work for a company that created a culture of sharing best practices.  Due to that culture, Sales Managers really developed relationships across territories and had the neatest (seriously, that’s the only word that really described it) flow of best practices.  These managers would even ask to be put on each other’s team distribution lists so they could have visibility into each other’s communication style and content (can you imagine requesting more e-mails!).

From this culture comes a sales meeting idea that should wake up Monday mornings and fit right in with our Guest Speaker spotlight this week.  Why don’t you and another Sales Manager trade teams for a week?  Lead each other’s sales team meeting, conduct one-on-ones and get out in the field with each other’s team.  Get together the next week and share observations, lessons you learned and ideas to improve.  Then, discuss those lessons with your team on your next sales team conference call.

This is fun, enlightening and energizing for both teams and both Sales Managers.  Keep it interesting – trade teams next week.

(Meeting to Win provides sales team meeting agendas and sales team meeting topics for Sales Managers who like to provide sales training and development weekly.  Visit us here:  http://www.meetingtowin.com/)

(Meeting to Win provides sales team meeting agendas for sales managers who subscribe to the sales team meeting service.  The agenda that goes out Friday, Feb 19th is the Quarterly Guest Speaker agenda.  We prompt sales teams to invite a guest speaker to their sales team meetings once per quarter.  To subscribe for your own sales team meeting agendas, visit us at http://www.meetingtowin.com/.)

Sales team meetings are a great time to learn new skills, exchange ideas and share best practices. They are also a great time to dig deeper on topics relevant to the sales team. This could be a product the team would like to sell more of, an upcoming marketing campaign or pricing issues.  When digging deeper on a certain topic, it is very helpful to invite a guest expert to your meeting.  This could be the Product Manager for a new product, your Marketing expert or your financial analyst. 

At Meeting to Win we recommend commiting to inviting guest speakers at least once per quarter. This adds a fresh voice and perspective and really adds some variety and interest to the weekly sales team meeting.  Choose the topic in advance, ask the team to choose and invite the guest speaker, make sure the topic is relevant to helping the team sell more and enjoy a nice twist on your weekly sales team meetings.

Sales Team Meeting Idea:

• Look at your next few sales team meeting agenda topics. 
• Determine if there is a relevant guest speaker that you could invite to support and provide expertise on one of the topics.   
• Invite them to your upcoming meeting and enjoy the fresh perspective and voice. 

Guest Speaker Ideas:

• A top performer from another sales team.
• A customer to share their experience with your company.
• Your CFO to discuss pricing, margins, company performance.
• Your Marketing Manager to share marketing information that can help you target and sell more effectively.
• Your Sales VP to discuss the company’s top initiatives and the sales team’s role in those.
• Another entire sales team (choose a peer Sales Manager and join the teams together for a sales team meeting/call) to share best practices across teams. Choose two or three topic areas – getting appointments, reduce discounting, etc – and ask the participants to bring ideas and best practices where they have them.

Go forth and invite!

I came across this great Selling Power article today and wanted to share with our readers:

Find Time for Training: 6 Steps for Incorporating Training into Sales Meetings from Selling Power

Add another dimension to sales meetings – one that pays off down the road.  While ongoing sales education is one key to success, it can be hard to find time for sales training in an already crowded meeting agenda. Hit your audience members with too much material, and you lose their interest. Try to work sales training in where you have an empty spot, and the odds are you’ll never work it in at all.  But you can successfully add a sales-training component to a sales meeting if you follow these six steps:

Read the rest…

Meeting to Win provides 30-60 minutes of sales training content weekly all designed for use during weekly sales team meetings.  Visit us at http://www.meetingtowin.com/ to sign up and get your weekly sales team meeting training topics. 

Blog post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Owner of Meeting to Win. Meeting to Win provides sales team meeting agendas for sales managers who want to equip their teams to win. To get a Sales Team Meeting Agenda that helps your team Seize the Day Every Day, visit our Store and download Seize the Day Every Day.

Our Meeting to Win subscribers just got an agenda that focuses on seizing the day every day.  The sales managers who subscribe to the weekly sales team meeting agendas were provided with a sales training exercise to help their teams decide what it means to seize the day in their unique sales role and then … actually do it.

To do this for yourself, figure out what you could do each day to move you closer to your goals.  Once you figure out what those few things are, schedule them every day.  These things are the most important things for you to do during your work hours. 

What you’ll find is that this will be as helpful in deciding what NOT to do as it is in deciding what to do. If you prioritize around the things that you MUST do to exceed goals, you will simply not have time for some less important things.  This simple exercise of not compromising on the activities that matter creates efficiencies in other activities and altogether eliminates some others. 

No one can do everything so make sure you and your team are doing the few things that really matter.

Have a great selling week!

Visit Meeting to Win at http://www.meetingtowin.com/.  Upcoming agendas include Troubleshooters and Turn Gatekeepers into Escorts.

I was honored to be consulted regarding a Selling Power Meetings Newsletter.  I wanted to share it here. To visit Meeting to Win, click here.

Make Sales Meetings Produce Results

by Renee Houston Zemanski  for Selling Power

In a very challenging economy, your sales meetings, whether they occur weekly, monthly, or yearly, provide multiple opportunities to bolster your team’s spirits and sales. Here are a number of ways to make your sales meetings pay off now and later.

“Every sales meeting should equip the sales team with information to compete more effectively,” says Jill Myrick, owner of Meeting to Win LLC, a company that provides sales team meeting content to help sales teams compete and win every week. “If you aren’t doing that, then you shouldn’t call it a sales meeting.”

To get the most out of your quarterly or annual meeting, Myrick suggests dividing it into different segments, making sure you have an agenda with set time limits. Begin the meeting by quickly reviewing the agenda to set the tone for the day. For example, open the meeting with “This is our objective for today,” or “At the end of our time together, you should all be able to…”

Read the rest…

Tired of seeing bad ideas win?  If you can answer “yes” to that question, keep reading.  I want to introduce an exciting new business tool.

My friend Ken Revenaugh of Fast Track Tools tells us that good ideas and a great vision are not enough to be successful today. Winners need an authoritative, convincing, articulate presentation. In response, Ken, a 15-year sales veteran and go-to communication expert, launched Fast Track Tools and an interactive online workshop, “Communicate to Win.” This is no boring audio recording! The program is a unique, interactive, career-boosting curriculum that provides practical, actionable information and resources for early-career and experienced professionals alike.

In addition to the valuable workshop, Ken shares a lot of great advice via his blog and several information-packed ebooks. I’ve seen Ken in action over the past 8 years and I highly recommend you visit his site and take a look at all the great resources: https://www.fasttracktools.com/. You can also follow him on Twitter @fasttracktools.