Closing Critical Deals - 10 Common Meeting Challenges

Closing Critical Deals – 10 Common Meeting Challenges

by Lois Wong

 

 

In the 1990’s it was my privilege to facilitate more than 1,000 executive meetings at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, with luminaries like Google’s Eric Schmidt (then Novell CEO), Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, Board Member Vernon Jordan, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, DARPA NIST Director Arati Prabhakar, and dozens of other company executives, even Hollywood legend William Shatner, and national cartoonist Garry Trudeau, of Doonesbury’s.

 

While these were important events for Xerox, none of them were more important than our customer sales meetings (multi-million dollar opportunities). For these meetings, we carefully planned "glimpses into the future”, with a goal of fostering deeper relationships and establishing credibility to further company business. Many hours of thought and planning go into preparing for these, including planning of the meeting agenda. 

 

Have you ever encountered any of the 10 Common Meeting Challenges?

 

1. The Decision Maker leaves early
2. The sales presentation takes longer than planned
3. “Surprise” customer attendees show up
4. Customers leave in the middle of the presentation
5. Customers show up late for the presentation
6. There are no questions from customers
7. Someone from your team takes the discussion off point
8. No technical expert is present to discuss details
9. A team member is more engaged with his blackberry than the meeting
10. The Decision Maker takes a humanities break during a key portion of the presentation

 

There are numerous ways to avoid these challenges. While there are no silver bullets, being proactive will reduce the chances that these challenges happen to you.

 

Here are the 10 Things to Consider When Setting up a Meeting.

 

1. Set mutual meeting goals and expectations in advance
2. Agree upon meeting start and stop times
3. Establish and communicate presentation with Q&A timeframes
4. Communicate with customers in advance to confirm attendee names, titles, and topics
5. Select relevant topics and minimize technical jargon
6. Send out a map along with an agenda that includes attendee names
7. Provide and discuss agenda with team members in advance
8. Prepare to have technical people attend or available by phone
9. Assign team members roles including summarizing action items
10. Designate explicit breaks

 

Thomas A. Kayser, author of Mining Group Gold, recommends starting every meeting with a mutually agreed upon statement of purpose. While this might seem like a trivial and somewhat obvious point, the majority of meetings start and finish without one. As a result: time is wasted, meetings are unproductive, sales cycles are elongated and everyone is frustrated.

 

A little preparation goes a long way. Good luck with your next sales meeting!

Major Account Selling: How to Prepare for a Customer Meeting

Major Account Selling: How to Prepare for a Customer Meeting

by Lois Wong

Most of us have experienced the frustration of an unproductive sales meeting. It often starts with introductions and small talk, and then a presentation ensues. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the presentation was given without a connection made to the direct and relevant benefits to the target company.

 

In order to differentiate yourself from your competitors, you must be prepared to present your company’s services in relation to the company’s goals and objectives. This requires careful preparation advance of the meeting, and then a guided discussion before the presentation that demonstrates your understanding of the company’s business, with the goal of verifying the information you have and to seek for further clarity and understanding of what they are trying to accomplish.

 

Here are The 9 Steps on How to Prepare for a Customer Meeting:

 

1.    Create an agenda based on the meeting purpose, establish a goal, and formulate a strategy.

2.    Research the Company

a.    Browse website

b.    Read press releases, recent news articles, and white papers, etc.

c.    Talk with your colleagues/vendors for insights

d.    Check company CRM for historical insights

e.    Check Linksv.com for company venture capital funding and Board members

f.     If public, use Google Finance to obtain a description of the company, management, and financials

3.    Call the administrative assistant to obtain names and titles of the attendees

4.    Check Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter for insights into your attendees

5.    Speak with the customer attendees about meeting requirements

6.    Send a draft meeting agenda to the customer attendees for their review

7.    Develop a strategy with your team.

8.    Relate company services and benefit during the presentation

9.    Anticipate questions and prepare for answers.

 

Thomas A. Kayser, a thought-leader in designing effective meetings, published Mining Group Gold: A Cooperative Approach to Meeting Effectiveness. I had the pleasure of working with Tom at Xerox. Tom honored me with one of his books, and it’s been my meeting Bible over the years. I’ve shared his best practices in my coaching business. Tom recommends that we start every meeting with a clear statement of its purpose. Understanding the goal of a meeting sets expectations for the session.

 

In my next blog I’ll share with you sales meeting challenges and successful elements of an effective agenda.

Best Practices In Sales: The Importance of Trust

The Importance of Trust in the Sales Process

 

 

I’m pathetic when it comes to cars. I just want them to work. I don’t care how or why. So when my car needs some service, I am at the mercy of the mechanic. I have no choice but to believe what they tell me, so my due diligence comes BEFORE I take my car in for repairs. I’ll ask friends and colleagues whom they recommend and I depend strongly on that recommendation. Here’s what I want – someone I can trust. I care about that as much as any other factor that I might deem important.

 

My guess is that your customers are no different. They are looking for a product, a person, and a company that they can trust.

 

“When people are uncertain, they don’t look inside of themselves. They look outside, to the counsel of legitimate experts.”

Dr. Robert Cialdini

 

Dr. Robert Cialdini is often referred to as the highest authority on persuasion and influence. (If you haven’t read his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion it’s worth a read.)

 

In order to gain someone’s trust, you must be both credible and knowledgeable.  This often involves presenting your information in an unbiased way.

 

But how do you create interactions that will lead to trust? Wouldn’t it be great if you had instant credibility?

 

Good news! There are ways to establish instant credibility...

 

·      A referral from a trusted source.  When a trusted entity tells your prospect that you are worth talking to, you have instant credibility.

 

·      Point out what you can’t do. That’s right. Let your prospect know FIRST what you can’t do.

 

“Before the most compelling portion of your argument, mention the weakness and drawbacks of your product or service.”

Dr. Robert Cialdini

 

Letting a prospect know the pros and cons of your service establishes you as both unbiased, and trustworthy. But don’t wait until the END of your presentation to point out the negative – put it out at the beginning. Consider these two highly successful tag lines:

 

·      Avis: We’re #2, so we try harder

·      Loreal: We’re expensive, but you’re worth it.

 

Establishing trust doesn’t always happen overnight. But having a strong referral network, and admitting your weaknesses upfront are two ways to quickly establish credibility. Don’t take my word – read it from the expert: www.influenceatwork.com.

Looking for the Right Sales Training Program?

by Lois Wong

Looking for the Right Sales Training Program?

When I was tasked with developing a training program for my company years ago, there were two things I needed

• #1: training for me (train-the-trainer)
• #2: training for the sales people.

There are many good sales training programs on the market; however, not many offer "Customization and Coaching".  In other words effective sales programs should provide customized training with follow-on coaching.  Without the follow-on coaching, the learning isn't reinforced nor are the metrics aligned with solid sales principles.

When sessions are taught in small portions (like a having small meals per day instead of one big banquet), information is ‘digested' more easily and ‘absorbed' more completely.  The combination of customized training and follow up incremental coaching enables better retention resulting in a higher degree of performance success.

Sales managers can provide a lot of benefit to their teams by doing their own "bite sized" training at weekly sales meetings. Spending even 20 minutes per week on training can make a big difference. Ways to structure these mini-training sessions include:

• Role playing an objection that came up during the week
• Assign each member of the sales team a particular sales skill that he/she needs to train the team on and rotate the training responsiblility among your team
• Assign a sales book, podcast, or video to the sales team and spend 20 minutes reviewing and role playing concepts that were presented
• Choose one deal per week that closed and analyze why
• Choose one deal per week that DIDN'T close and analyze why

These are just a few suggestions to get you started. We'd love to hear what's worked for you in the past. Let us know!

Repeatable Sales Process

Repeatable Sales Process

 

Are the ups and downs of sales really unavoidable? Is the sales roller coaster a given?

As I work with sales teams across the country, it seems that the roller coaster effect is not only accepted, it is expected. This is a dangerous attitude for individuals, teams and the companies that we work for.

And I'm here to tell you that roller coasters are NOT a necessary function of sales. In order to create consistent results, you need a repeatable sales process. And the first step is identifying the metrics required for success, and then putting together the activities to support the metrics.

As an example, one of my clients sells cloud services, and each sales representative has a quota of (7) cloud deals per day. In order to make that number, we worked backwards to get at their metrics.

Customers generally sign up only after they've had a demo. But 90% of the people who see demos, end up buying the product.

Quota: 49 deals per week
Demos (90% close ratio): 55 demos per week

For every person that a sales representative talks to, 75% of them agree to a demo.

Demos: 55 per week
Conversations (75% close ratio): 74 conversations per week

A Sales Representative will get a live person on the phone about 20% of the time.

Conversations: 74 per week
Dials (20% close ratio): 370 per week

Now we have the beginning of a repeatable sales process based on metrics.

Quota	Week	Day
# of Cloud Deals	49	7
Activities	Week	Day
# of Outbound Calls (Dials)	370	74
# of Conversations	74	15
# of Demos	55	1

Once we have our baseline metrics identified, we can fine tune our sales skills to create efficiencies in the activities that we're identified as essential to success.