Preparation can make or break a sales meeting with prospects or clients. If you enter the sales meeting ready to answer questions and address resistance, you’ll strengthen the relationship and help your prospect or client increase their trust in you. If the meeting is unorganized and unprofessional, however – and you’re not able to answer the questions that come up – sales potential can slip away very quickly.
NSCA Member Advisory Councilmember Corporate Sales Coaches has helped integration firms of all sizes prepare and plan for effective, successful sales meetings. As Bob Lobascio, senior associate at Corporate Sales Coaches, points out in his training sessions: “Prior proper planning promotes peak performance” (he refers to this phrase as the “six Ps of sales planning”).
These customized coaching sessions walk sales professionals through the many considerations and questions to ask as they prepare for upcoming sales meetings – from the prospect’s financial situation and purchasing history to what road blocks they may have in place preventing them from investing in new technology. The goal is to walk away from the meeting with it being not only beneficial for you, but also for the customer or prospect.
Although most of the sales tips and secrets are revealed only in Corporate Sales Coaches’ training sessions, there are a few takeaways we can share with you:
- Consider the person you’re talking to as you address key business issues and answer questions. Are you dealing with the CFO? The IT director? The sales manager? Depending on who it is, the focus and message will be different.
- Create consistent and impressive bios for each team member that can be shared via email, used on LinkedIn, and inserted into proposals. When written the right way, these bios can quickly let customers know how qualified and knowledgeable your team is – and why they’re well equipped to handle the project.
- Educate sales professionals on the industry, different markets, and technology. There are still so many salespeople who know very little about what technology integration involves, why it’s beneficial, and how to find the best solution for their customers.
- Pinpoint the personality traits of the person you’re selling to. Once you’ve identified their job role, it’s important to understand how they work, what’s important to them, what motivates them, what causes them stress, and how they best solve problems. For this, you’ll become familiar with the DiSC personal assessment tool.
“When I worked with Corporate Sales Coaches, I was able to indulge in their wealth of knowledge through the classroom training and eventually through one-on-one coaching to ensure that I was directing my teams toward success,” says Mike Shinn, technology operations and marketing professional at Verrex. “In the time I was engaged with Corporate Sales Coaches, I could draw a direct correlation to the increased performance of my sales team (22%+). I was also able to coach through operational differences that were occurring between my teams by simply teaching all parties how best to interact with one another. The performance of my teams increased exponentially due to the training, and there was a recognizable increase in revenue and profits due to the program.”
“Our results so far have been great. Prospecting techniques, overcoming customer objections, and time-management principles have all seen improvements,” says Jeremy Johnson, vice president of sales at Interactive Solutions Inc. “All three of our account managers have very confident, strategic plans to exceed assigned sales quotas in 2017. I’m looking to send another group through later in the year.”
To learn more about how sales training could help your sales team reach their full potential, visit www.nsca.org/shape-better-sales-corporate-sales-coaches. To set up a training session for your sales team, contact Mike Abernathy at mabernathy@nsca.org.