Adopting A More Consistent Approach To Sales Meetings

It is often said that ‘no two sales meetings are the same’. That is certainly true across large sales teams, where each salesperson bring their own personalities, styles and emphasis to the sales meetings. Indeed, each sales person may vary their approach considerably from meeting to meeting.

The result is that there is no consistency in terms of:

• The objectives for the meeting

• The level of preparation (and pre-qualification) undertaken

• the features and benefits that are highlighted/emphasises

• The balance of listening and talking

• The questions that are asked

• the information that is gathered

• How objections are handled

• What information, or insights are shared

• Whether a presentation is given and what it covers

• If meeting notes are taken and entered in the sales/CRM system

• What next steps are proposed

• What follow-up is undertaken after the meeting

There are a 100 ways to sell most products, or solutions. But there are not 100 right ways. Sophisticated sales organisations have perfected the science of selling to find the best way to sell and that includes the best way to manage a sales meeting.

Now nobody wants to put salespeople in a straight jacket and we certainty want to avoid any notion of mass producing sales meetings, where real interaction between buyer and seller is sidelined.

However in the drive for more effective sales meetings, we do want to ensure a core set of sales meetings principles, or quality standards are adhered to.

So, has your sales team decided upon the best questions to ask in a sales meeting, the best way to handle specific objections, the most effective sales meeting follow-up and so on?

Many managers are striving for greater consistency in terms of how sales meetings are managed. They complain that while sales prospects are difficult to find and costly to meet, too many initial sales meetings go nowhere. All this means they want a more effective approach to sales meetings applied more consistently.

So what are managers doing to ensure greater consistency across sales meetings:

• Ride-alongs – salespeople (as well as managers) sitting in on other people’s sales meetings in order to witness what is and is not working for others

• Sales Kits – documenting the organisation’s sales wisdom, in terms of standard sales materials, pre-meeting preparation (and pre-qualification) check-list, sales meeting fact-finds, lists of customer FAQs and objections and guidelines on how to handle them,

• Sales training workshops – bringing the sales team together to review and discuss sales techniques used, role play sales meetings, etc.

• KPIs for sales meetings – managers are paying more attention to meeting related metrics such as the number of sales meetings, the cost of sales meetings and most important of all conversion rates. This is supported by a drive to ensure that all sales meetings are tracked in the sales/CRM system.

  
  

Posted by Ray Collis on 10:01 am. Filed under 8. Make Time For Preparation, Sales Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry