In our recent research paper by SalesITV’s John Dougan, “Bet Your Sales Meeting is failing” on sales meeting effectiveness, we uncovered a bunch of alarming detail, including;
25% of surveyed Sales Managers believe their Sales Meetings have NO impact on either SALES RESULTS or CUSTOMER CONVERSATIONS.
We now know they do have an impact, but not in the way they think.
One of the terrible things about running poorly executed sales meetings is that we don’t fully consider the knock-on-effect they have on our customers.
If we’re running sales meetings that lack value, direction and inspiration for our team, we can be sure that this is reflected in the meetings they’re running with their prospects and customers.
If our sales meetings aren’t helping our team to have better conversations with our potential customers, we are actually reducing the likelihood of our sellers being the winning vendor. Isn’t a sales meeting supposed to HELP salespeople win deals, not kill deals first thing Monday morning?
How about this; If our customers were invited inside our sales meetings would they be disappointed in the quality of the conversation or would they be pleased to be the focus?
Our sales meetings should be where we set the standard for how customer meetings should be run – punctual, prepared and purposeful.
Use this time to get your team focused, empower them with skills and keep motivation running high so they’re raring to go when we wrap up the meeting. If we promote this standard each week, we will find that it cascades through their daily activity, including meetings with customers.
What should we do?
- Role-model the type of behaviour that we would like to see in customer meetings in our sales meetings. (Lead by example).
- Share best practice within the selling team. Who is having great conversations and how?
- Focus on sharpening skills, beliefs and behaviours in our meetings.
Here’s to losing fewer deals first thing Monday.
As well as being a sales execution coach and trainer to Australia’s corporate sector. Mark is the #1 ranked Linkedin Social Seller in Australia. Contact Mark via Inmail message or for a discussion around sales training, coaching, social media, golf, cycling, AFL and sales effectiveness.
Twitter: Mark McInnes @mamcinnes
