The Trap of Nice Meetings
Are your meetings moving the revenue needle, or are your getting ghosted?
Are your meetings moving the revenue needle, or are your getting ghosted?
Have you seen the photo of a smog-less downtown LA making the rounds? Beautiful, isn’t it?
Smogless Los Angeles at Echo Park during COVID-19
The irony of the pandemic is that while life has been seriously disrupted, this has also meant people are more available. With no commute, no business travel, and nowhere to go, this has meant more time working from home.
There are no studies yet, but I would wager we are now working longer. First, it’s harder to switch from work mode to personal life, we are on a pseudo “on-call” state. Second, for many reasons, many folks are just not as productive working from home. One ironic outcome of our virtual working world though is that people are more available than before.
Last month I opened my calendar for 1:1’s with the Enterprise Sales Forum community. While most acknowledged that prospecting has gotten harder, others had a different problem. They booked plenty of meetings, but the meetings didn’t lead anywhere.
“The majority of meetings should be discussions that lead to decisions.”
- Patrick Lencioni
Getting meetings with prospects is great. But we don’t get paid on meetings. Even if you are a SDR/BDR, the true marker of success is revenue. The objective is to book meetings that result in sales. How do you avoid the trap of nice meetings that result in nothing?
There is a perspective about every engagement with prospects that most sales reps don’t realize:
“Every sales conversation with a prospect is a negotiation.”
We tend to compartmentalize negotiation as what happens at the end of a sales cycle when contracts and lawyers are involved. However, every time you are speaking with a prospect, you are making a series of mini-agreements that allows the sale to progress. While not as high stakes as a hostage situation, knowing that every time you engage a prospect is in itself a negotiation should cause you to reconsider how you prepare.
With that in mind, let me share a framework to make the most of your prospect meetings.
1)Establish Meeting Goals — What are you expecting out of a meeting? Obviously to move the sales process along, but you are not the only one in the conversation. Do you know what your prospect is expecting? Most meetings fall flat because there is very little consideration for the prospect cares about. You see this in demos that are more like throwing spaghetti at a wall than an engaging discussion about business outcomes. What are those goals? You have three clues:
The message your prospect responded to. If you followed my advice on the Messaging Matrix, you should have an idea as to what piqued their interest.
The questions you send in an email follow up to setup the meeting. Ask “what are three things you are looking to get out of tour call” and use the response as a guide (but take with a grain of salt since the prospect may not be so forthcoming with information.)
The first ten minutes of your meeting. The worst thing you can do is launch straight into a demo or presentation at the start of the meeting. Use the beginning of the meeting to reconfirm objectives and what would be most important to takeaway in the meeting.
2) Prepare Open Ended Questions — Questions will provide insights into what your prospect is doing and what they really care about. Good questions begin with “How” or “What”, as in “if you did X, how would that effect Y” or “What is the thinking behind X”. Have a series of relevant questions prepared that will educate you and provide the basis for an engaging discussion.
3) More Them, Less You — A universal truth is that people like to talk about themselves. Act on that instinct using open ended questions to spur discussion with your prospect and among their team. But equally important is clearing your mind and deeply listening to what the prospect. Avoid the urge to interrupt the prospect and to think of how to respond. Just listen.
4) Summarize the Situation — Once you have found a natural break in the conversation and before you get into any demo or pitch, get agreement from the prospect that your understanding is accurate. This is why active listening is so critical, otherwise you may miss things to refine your summary. If the prospect does not agree with the summary, take time to discuss.
5) Anticipate the Blockers & Motivators — If your demo / presentation was well aligned to your prospect’s goals, then there will be questions. This is the opportunity to expose blockers and the genuine motivations in taking the meeting. Do not simply answer the question! End every response with an open ended question that ties back to the meeting goals and summary.
6) Setup Actionable Ending — All too many meetings end with loose commitments like “we’ll call you” or “we need to take it to our team”. That is a clear sign you will be ghosted. You many have heard of the acronym STAR as used for situational interviews. As applied to meetings, it means:
Specific — Follow up has specific people involved and item(s) to be discussed
Timeframe — Setting a hard date is best, but a committed timeframe is OK
Action — What is needed to prepare adequately for next meeting
Result — What outcome is expected out of next meeting
By getting your prospect to agree to a STAR follow-up, there is less of a possibility of the next meeting falling through the cracks because now there is ownership on all sides.
Note that given COVID19, you will need to adjust your expectations in terms of Actionable Endings. People and companies are still sorting themselves out. If you cannot get firm commitments because of the timing, make sure you keep your prospects “warm” through a follow up campaign that provides insights and useful content. Remember, your best play at the moment is to build trust, credibility and rapport so that you build pipeline quickly in the following quarter once the pandemic eases.
Note that there are a LOT of details that I am not including here because these posts are already too packed with information. So the next series of posts will dive into the nitty-gritty of each of these steps. If you do have questions in the meantime, send me an email at mark@esfsales.com or connect with me on LinkedIn, and I will do my best to provide assistance.
Be your awesome self and stay positive!
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