THE IMAGE TO WIN SERIES

I heard Tom Cruise on a talk show many years ago talking about the brand “Tom Cruise“.  He is the product and the brand and everything he says, does, wears or is involved in adds or detracts from the Tom Cruise brand.  This is the same for salespeople; just with a smaller audience in most cases.

Today’s installment of the Image to Win Series focuses on defining the brand of YOU.  Tom Cruise knows what he wants his brand to be.  What an important first step!  Thinking about celebrities, you can assume that Madonna’s brand is very different from Barack Obama’s brand.  Everything any of these public figures does sends a message and creates an image of their brand in the minds of the public.  They know how to act, what to write, what to say, what to wear and where to be seen based on the image they want the public to have.  They often have the advantage of publicists and managers who help guide them – let’s call them their VPs of Marketing.

Do you know the brand or image you want the world to see from you as a sales professional?  Take a moment and write a list of 10 adjectives you want customers to use to describe your image or brand.

1.   __________________________
2. ___________________________
3. ___________________________
4. ___________________________
5. ___________________________
6. ___________________________
7. ___________________________
8. ___________________________
9. ___________________________
10. ___________________________

Now, what actions would people have to see from you to create that image in their minds?  Also, think about what they would see from you to detract from that image.

Tom Cruise jumped around on Oprah’s couch and severely detracted from the brand and image he spent 20+ years developing.  I think I read he had also just fired his manager…   Don’t leave your image to chance.  Take the time to define your brand and what your brand stands for.  Then, carefully choose your words, images, virtual presence and appearance to fit your brand.

We’ll continue with this Image to Win Series and dig into specifics on developing your brand.  In the meantime, pay attention to brands you respect – Coke, Starbucks, Target, etc.  Look at every action they take, where they show up, what messages they share, how their employees dress and every other detail of their brand.  Should be a fun series!

Sales Managers, to take your team on an Image to Win journey, sign up for weekly sales team meeting agendas from Meeting to Win.  The Image to Win sales meeting series starts in October.

As a sales professional, what do you envision when you think of yourself?  Do you strive to be a rep that hits goals or do you see yourself as someone buying a beach house after a good year?  There is a difference.  Too many (about 95% at any given company) have their sights set too low.  They are happy to get by, content to simply hit sales goals month after month.

This post is to challenge you to see a different sales rep when you look in the mirror. Train your brain to expect more than what 95% of sales reps expect from themselves.

To change your mindset, try the following things:

• First of all, get a vision of what you want to be. Or, as a starting point, what you don’t want to be.
• Now, find other people who have achieved that vision and figure out a way to spend some time with them.
• Read books by people who have achieved what you are trying to achieve.
• Figure 2-3 actions they took or are taking and begin taking those same actions on a consistent basis.

By taking the above actions you can begin to train your brain to think differently, to have different expectations for your life and to expect different things for your future. 

Mindset is a powerful navigator.  Point yours in the right direction. 

Join other Meeting to Win subscribers this fall as we tackle sales topics to help your team reach the top of their game.

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.)

(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/)