How do you become a mission-critical part of your customer’s team? The one that they call to uncover opportunities to improve, solve problems or get results? To become this part, you first have to know what is critical to the mission. As sales experts in our respective fields, it is our job to expose what is critical to the mission and then suggest ways to accomplish those things.
For example, I provide sales team meeting agendas for Sales Leaders. It is my responsibility to demonstrate to sales leaders how a consistent, strategic communication schedule can impact sales performance, team morale, turnover, bench strength and customer satisfaction. I am the expert and I am responsible for teaching and solving.
There are many ways to get to the table or to the point of solving. One very powerful way to get in the door and to the table is by offering to do an Assessment. In my case, I could do a Sales Meeting Assessment. My message to a prospective customer is simply, “As an expert at driving sales performance and important initiatives with sales meetings, I’d be happy to assess the effectiveness of your current sales team meeting strategy. After assessing your current approach, I will return to you the results of my assessment along with opportunities to more effectively use sales meetings to drive performance. The outcomes may be things you can do on your own. If there are areas Meeting to Win can help to improve your sales meetings, we’ll certainly include those options in our report.”
This approach is extremely valuable to a prospective customer (many sales teams even charge for this!) and they rarely say “no”. There is no risk for them to have an expert examine their business and share process improvements. The salesperson conducting the assessment has license to learn every detail of how they handle that process now. The intent must truly be to share ideas, best practices and solutions to improve.
The outcome is very often an active sales cycle for the salesperson and some great ideas to consider for the customer.
Understand the mission, help them reach the goal and you become … mission-critical.
Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting agendas for Sales Managers. This week’s agenda is Tie Your Solutions to Their Goals. If you would like to lead your team through exercises designed to help them become mission-critical to their customers, subscribe today.
