I am "huge" on preparing for sales meetings but I am "tiny" on preparing slides for sales meetings.

Quote of the week from a sales manager friend:

"Our best sales people really don't take anything to a sales meeting - they just have a conversation with the prospect"

Amen!

Your goal in a sales meeting is to listen.  Not to present.  You don't need slides or stacks of brochures to listen.  Ask questions and listen.  Sure, take some blank paper on which to write notes, so you remember the prospect's answers to your questions.

Do take time to prepare for the meeting.  Spend this time on researching the prospect's company and the prospect themselves from as many angles as possible (relative to the importance of the prospect).  Develop key questions based on your research aimed at further understanding the prospect's goals, challenges and constraints.  Write these questions down on your piece of paper so you remember to ask them when you are actually in the meeting (it's easy to forget a question, or two, while in a live sales meeting).

So next time you go to a sales meeting don't spend hours preparing your Powerpoint slides, spend hours understanding your prospect and developing your questions.  Put your questions in your pocket and leave your hands free for a pen to write down the prospects answers.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (2)

Salespeople are under-appreciated.

Salespeople do some of the hardest and most important work in the vast majority of companies and yet often are the "scapegoat" when things go wrong.

All this negative energy directed towards sales people often starts to seep into our own psyche and starts us off on a round of pessimism that impacts our performance.  Anyone who has sold anything knows you have to be "up" on yourself every day if you want to sell effectively.

My friend Stuart Scott just wrote the first in a series of articles about appreciation.  This first one is about appreciating yourself. 

If you sell, read this article (and the following ones in the series).  It may seem a little alternative to some but if salespeople appreciate themselves they will have more positive energy and hence will sell more. Hey, I can appreciate that!

This spring I declared into existence The Appreciation Project. Its purpose is to increase the total quantity of appreciation in the world. Just for the fun of it.

I’d like to tell you how the project got started. It grew from a simple observation - that appreciation doesn’t exist until you express it. Merely to feel appreciative doesn’t add to the world’s stock of appreciation. You have to communicate your appreciation for it to have an effect.

More of the article

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)