Handling Sales Meetings

The blogger and author Geoffrey James  recently posted this  article  about sales meetings:

-  6 Ways to Really Irritate a Customer

which I thought I would share with you because it has some great lessons on sales training for any business to business salesperson.

Sales Meetings Tips

My personal favourites are:

1) Don’t do an information dump and

2)  Don’t show up and throw up.

For me these two tend to work hand in hand. If anyone ever came to me and opened up the laptop and uttered that phrase:

“I’m just going to tell you all about us”

The meeting would have an abrupt ending.

When I run sales training courses, I work with the delegates to put a meeting structure in place that always focuses on the client first by asking questions. Only after understanding their needs are any possible solutions fed back – if appropriate.

Top Sales Meetings Tips

My two top sales meetings tips would be:

1. Always ask how much time the other person has – even if you agreed a time before hand it is very likely that things have changed.
2. Always ask if it is possible to achieve your desired outcome at every beginning of sales meetings. This way you can work the meeting according to the response. For instance you might say “Gill, at the end of the meeting we should know enough to make a decision on rolling out the pilot project. Is that OK?”. Gill might say OK but she might also say “Sorry. No can do. I need My Vice Presidents rubber stamp on this. I had expected him to be here today but he was called away”. That’s not a problem for you now because now you can set the goal as rescheduling a meeting with the VP for next week. It’s better to agree this at the beginning of the meeting rather getting to the end and asking for something that was never on the cards

Read Geoffreys article(s) on sales meetings, you will like it and it will increase your effectiveness and ability to handle sales meetings.