At Your Next Sales Meeting
Below are twelve practical steps that comprise a crash course for simplifying your team’s sales process and increasing your team’s sales effectiveness. This sales meeting should take approximately 90 minutes.
1. Prior to the meeting, prepare two slides. The first slide should show your current sales process in as much detail as possible. (If you do not have a sales process, create a slid that shows a very complex theoretical sales process.) The second slide should show the three key elements of every sales process, as given at the beginning of this article.
2. Prior to the meeting, inform the sales reps that they will need to bring three things: their list of prospects in hard-copy form, their current sales presentation, and their appointment calendar.
3. Open the meeting with the statement that your goal is to simplify the sales process in order to make everyone on the team more effective. Tell the reps that they will need to participate fully, because you’re going to be accomplishing a lot in a very short period of time
4. Display the first slide that you prepared. Pretend you are going to go into detail on each and every step in the sales process. Wait for the groans to subside then display the second slide. Point out that these three elements are the backbone of every sales process, and therefore the meeting will focus on each element in turn.
5. Have the team members get out their prospect lists. Ask them to go through their list and underline every prospect who isn’t a true decision maker. The name of every “influencer” or “stakeholder” or “gatekeeper” should be underlined.
6. Instruct the team members to stop calling on anybody who isn’t a decision maker. When they complain (and they will), explain why meeting with people who don’t have decision-making power is a waste of time. Suggest that, rather than meeting with non-decision makers, they spend the extra time cold calling to make appointments with real decision makers. You should now be 15 minutes into the meeting.
7. Have the team break into groups of three. Have one member of the group be a presenter, have the second member be a customer, and have the third member be an observer. Have the presenter give a 10 minute version of his or her sales presentation. Have the observer and “customer” critique the presentation, spending no more than five minutes on the critique.
8. Repeat step 7 twice, rotating the roles. Be sure to wander around the room and listen to the various presentations.
9. When all three members of each group have presented, open the floor for discussion about what was effective and what was not. Add your own perspective to the discussion based on what you’ve seen. Spend 10 minutes on this step. You should now be 70 minutes into the meetings.
10. Have the team members get out their calendars. Ask for a volunteer. (Pick somebody who’s relatively thick-skinned.) Have the volunteer share his or her schedule for the next three days. With the help of the rest of the team, suggest ways to make that schedule more effective by scheduling the optimum number of sales meetings and by moving nonworking-hour activities, such as CRM, into off-hours.
11. Repeat step 10 with another schedule.
12. Close the meeting with enthusiasm. Thank the team for participating and resolve to the revisit these issues at successive sales meetings.
