Ralph Burns of Sales Management Mastery is a friend of Meeting to Win.  He shared a creative meeting idea with his readers, including me, this week.  Enjoy his idea!

Warning:  Use This Sales Training Meeting Idea at Your Own Risk

I really enjoy Seth Godin’s insights and ideas.  I subscribe to his blog and am often challenged by his ideas.  On Valentine’s Day he published a blog post called Invent a Holiday.  In practicing proactive sales and sales management over the years, calendaring things has been a critical success factor for me so… I like the idea of holidays or awareness months ( example:  Breast CancerAwareness Month - Oct).  Take Mother’s Day for example.  We should show our mothers how much we appreciate them throughout the year and hopefully you do.  I like the idea of taking a day each year to focus on just that.  The holiday is a disciplined way to make sure a year doesn’t go by where you don’t do something extra special for your mom. 

Just like in business, you have to create a system of focus to keep focus on the important things.  Salespeople turn in a weekly activity report because just knowing you have to do the activity doesn’t seem to be good enough.  Human beings need a Focus System to stay on task.  The activity report is a weekly Sales Activity Awareness Day for sales activity.  We, as salespeople, are disciplined to focus on our important sales activity once a week when we celebrate this focus by turning in our activity reports.  Just like Mother’s Day, is sales activity any more important on Sales Activity Awareness Day than on any other day?  Of course not.  It’s just the day we choose to bring some awareness to it.

So, this brings me to my point.  As a team, why not create a customer focused day, week or month that customers know about, it goes on the calendar and the entire company celebrates it?  We should be celebrating customers every day and make sure you do.  In the spirit of putting important things on the calendar, I would use one month per year to focus only on celebrating customers.  Here is what would happen that month:

• Senior leaders would get on the road with sales reps and visit customers for the entire month.
• Sales reps would collect report cards from their customers on how they are meeting the needs they promised to meet upon contract.
• Sales reps would do customer analyses to make sure they are meeting the changing needs of their customers.
• Every functional department (Marketing, Accounting, HR, etc) would get together to make sure they are creating, promoting and supporting the customers.  Each department should have the goal of doing one thing to improve the customer’s experience with their company.  (For example, billing could create a simpler invoice, HR could help keep customer service positions filled, etc)
• Each day would be a company focus on a top customer – this could be communicated with an email or an intranet video depending on your company’s communication preferences.  The entire company would be aware of it’s top 22 customers at month’s end.  (I wonder if everyone in the HR department knows the Top 10 customers right now.)

Well, back from “If-I-ruled-the-world Land…”, here is an idea of how to use this invent a holiday concept on your own sales team.

Sales Team Meeting Idea:

• As a team, invent a holiday.
• Decide what is worth celebrating or creating awareness about.
• Decide when it should be and how you will celebrate or create the awareness.
• Determine what resources you will need.
• Enjoy your new holiday!

My husband has said this so many times and he is so often right.  When prospective clients “go dark” or “off the grid” as we say around my house, it is often not a great sign.  This week’s Meeting to Win sales team agenda is Part 3 in our Maximize Customer Meetings Series.  Part 3 is about what you do after the meeting to maximize your customer meeting. 

Here is one thing to do to guard against the enemy of time.  Do your follow-up items right away.  You can control the pace and momentum of your opportunity if you set a timeline with the customer and set the pace with timely follow-up with the next steps.  Get your internal team mobilized and committed to fast turnaround, also.  Don’t wait 48 hours to send your thank yous and set next steps.  Get it done ASAP! 

As more and more time passes, priorities shift and obstacles are introduced in the process.  Keep the pace and don’t let time kill your deals. 

Join us for weekly sales team meeting agendas by subscribing to Meeting to Win HERE.  (Upcoming Sales Team Meeting Agendas include 10 Things You Don’t Know and Playing to Win or Playing to NOT Lose?.  Subscribe now and join us for these upcoming sales meeting topics and the new Sales Performance Book Club, Mind of the Customer.)

I subscribe to the daily sales quotes from Just Sell.  Earlier this week they sent out this timely quote on luck.  It got me thinking about how people create their own luck.  As a St. Patrick’s Day wish, I want to include 10 Ways to Create Your Own Luck. 

10 Ways to Create Your Own Luck

(Plus Sales Team Meeting Idea)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from Meeting to Win

1.  Execute 5 Cold Calls per Day.

2.  Add a new active Referral Partner monthly.

3.  Know your top 10 most commonly heard objections and be prepared to address them.

4.  Have a formula for strong Opening Statements and use it… everytime.

5.  Learn to recognize bad deals and walk away from them.

6.  Read the Wall Street Journal every weekday.

7.  Consult with a team mate weekly on live deals.

8.  Conduct quarterly business reviews with existing customers.

9.  Read a business book every quarter.

10.  Study your customers and come up with one new idea to help a customer every week. 

HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY

Sales Team Meeting Idea:

As a team:

• Share times in your professional life when you “got lucky”. 
• What led up to that luck?
• Create a list of how salespeople can create their own luck.  You can start with the list above and add to it.
• At the end of the meeting, each salesperson should commit to one thing from the list they are currently NOT doing and will START doing.

We are in week #3 of  the Maximize Customer Meetings sales team meeting agenda series.  Our Meeting to Win subscribers get a new, 60-minute sales team meeting agenda by e-mail each Friday. This week Maximize Customer Meetings: After the Meeting is delivered to subscribers.  I came across an article from Kelley Robertson on effective follow-up that supports this week’s topic.  Enjoy!

The Impact of Follow-Up by Kelley Robertson

This got me wondering…why don’t people follow-up? I think there are several reasons.

Read the rest here.

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 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.