This is one of the three key questions that all sales managers should be asking their people: You have a big meeting next week, what’s your plan for it? What are they expecting? What is the valid business reason for the meeting? Who will be there from our side? What role will each person play? What questions will our team ask? Who will ask them, and in what sequence? What commitments will you get? What credibility do you have? Wow, a lot of questions! If you have worked weeks to get the meeting with the key decision makers, there are a lot of things that will go into the plan.
You see, the only thing that can move a deal though the pipeline is interactions with prospects and customers. That’s why planning is so important. But, how do you do it? When your reps go out to visit prospects, do they understand what concerns them, or do they go in and pitch? Do they probe as to what the prospect needs to do to improve their business or even survive in today’s economy? What are their goals and aspirations? Do they have a clear idea of what they are? What would they find compelling and how would they want to receive that important information?
Our process for planning for the meeting begins with defining your target market and the profile of your ideal customer. Then we offer sales training programs to standardize your sales team on how they market them self to get appointments and how to conduct the actual sales call. Here are a few programs.
Conceptual Selling® – The Miller Heiman program for “Customer-focused Interaction Strategy and Planning”
Conceptual Selling® helps orchestrate the meeting/phone-call to connect the way salespeople sell to the way their customers buy. The program clearly defines how to unearth a customer’s key issues and concerns in order to better focus selling efforts on what the buyer needs to accomplish.
Using the popular Green Sheet tool, organizations gain a framework to view the sale from the customer’s perspective, build credibility, and create collaborative win-win solutions. Conceptual Selling® gives organizations a common process and language to intelligently pursue sales opportunities. This allows internal teams to improve collaboration on large deals and see more movement of opportunities through the sales cycle.
Executive Impact SM – The Miller Heiman strategy for securing executive approval
Executive Impact is a framework for understanding how C-Level executives make decisions in order to align the salesperson’s approach to the way executives prefer to buy. By tailoring the approach to meet an executive’s style of processing information, organizations will enable salespeople to have more effective C-level meetings. It provides the process for identifying the executive’s decision-making styles in order to deliver the right information to improve the probability of success. The program is available as a one-day program or a condensed half-day skill builder.
Securing Strategic AppointmentsSM – The Miller Heiman program generating appointments
Securing Strategic Appointments provides companies a solid foundation to build stronger techniques for targeting contacts to secure high-value meetings. Organizations will increase their prospecting confidence by learning to develop compelling reasons for prospects to agree to meetings. It is a prospecting framework which leverages the best practices of top performers. Over time, successful frameworks can be compiled and stored to create a database of outbound call, marketing or email campaigns.