The Secret Strategy for Meaningful Sales Meetings

by Dave Kahle

Oops!  Got a sales meeting coming up in two weeks, better get ready for it.  Let’s see, what should we do?  I’ll go over last month’s numbers, that’ll take a half hour.  Then…I know!  The credit manager has been complaining about the state of receivables lately.  I’ll have him come in and complain directly to the sales guys.  That’ll take about an hour.  

Now what….

Does that scenario sound familiar?  All too often that’s how we plan our sales meetings.  The focus is on how to fill the time, what information we want to transmit, and who we want to present it.

When the focus is on the agenda, it’s easy to wander off, to fill the time with needless details, and to end up with a boring and non-productive meeting.  With a meeting like that it’s no wonder that most sales people would rather be in the field, doing their jobs, than killing time at a sales meeting.

Here is a powerful strategy guaranteed to make sales meetings more meaningful for your sales people, and more valuable for you.

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Instead of starting with an agenda, start at the end.  By that, I mean focus first on the end result that you want from the agenda.  Then, build the agenda to achieve that focus.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say you have a range of new prices on some of your current products.  You are planning to spend an hour presenting them and answering questions.  That sounds good.  Who could object to that?

So, your sales meeting agenda looks like this:

1. Present new prices

Let’s dig through it to come up with the end.  Why are you presenting the new prices?  You might say, “So the sales people will know them and understand why we are changing prices.”

OK, why do you want that?

“So they will be able to convey them to the customers.”

Why do you want to do that?

“So the customer will accept the new prices without too much objection.”

What you really want, then, is the customer to accept the new prices without raising too much of ruckus about them?

“Yes.”

And you want sales people to convey the prices in a way that accomplishes that?

“Yes.”

OK, so let’s start there.  

In order to get what you want... READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.