The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Your IFM's should be the most productive and most important time spent with your sales reps every week.

For those unfamiliar with the acronym IFM, it stands for Individual Focus Meeting. What is an IFM? It's what our team at The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) calls your weekly one-on-one meetings with your salespeople (CSS loves to create an acronym for more common sales terms to keep you on your toes.)

Numerous studies support the fact that one-on-one meetings have a large impact on your team’s performance. So, if you’re struggling with IFM’s, it’s time to prioritize and improve with these three tips.

When you think about the sales meetings you attend, are you delighted or disappointed? Are you engaged or enraged? Is your time spent in the meetings worthwhile or wasted?

Sales meetings are a staple in most every sales department. Time is money to every salesperson and sales leader. It’s up to the sales leader to make sure each meeting is positive, motivating, and worthwhile. Treat your sales team like customers who want to feel like their needs have been met and that they leave the meeting enlightened and energized.

Case Studies and campaign recaps are powerful tools to help sell success. When managers share individual wins with their team, it boosts morale, sparks ideas, and motivates others to do similar work.

Salespeople value the real-life experience of their peers. After all, the best part of working in sales is celebrating your biggest wins after hours, weeks, maybe even months of hard work. Sales wins are a combination of strategies, tools, and content — doesn't other players on your team want to know what worked well for the salesperson who sealed the deal?

Once you have an appointment with a strong prospect, it’s time to prepare for a successful needs analysis so all the effort you spent getting the appointment isn’t wasted. You want to make sure that you have a strong and thorough needs analysis—because understanding your prospect's desired business results, challenges, and expectations is essential for developing a solution that will achieve results.

At the core of every successful workforce management practice is communication. As managers and sellers adapt to this new normal, clear communication and scheduled talk time is more important than ever before. Talk time comes in forms such as:

• Manager to seller talk time
• Manager to key customer talk time
• Seller to key and secondary customer talk time

Email is great for communicating data and confirming details, but nothing beats a conversation. Especially when the person on the other end of the line—phone or video—has a problem and needs to tap into your problem-solving expertise. Whether with your sales team, customers, or prospects, regular check-ins promote open communication and stop larger issues from festering, as well as allow for immediate feedback.

In addition to generating revenue and keeping their sales pipeline strong, sales managers are also tasked with running effective remote sales meetings. In our current work-from-home world, managers need to stay connected with sellers to conduct the following types of meetings:

• Sales meetings
• Training sessions
• One-on-one meetings (revenue development focused meetings)
• Meetings with clients

Below are some technical tips used by world-class managers to deliver a high-quality virtual experience. When the following guidelines are observed, you’ll run an effective remote sales meetings that will produce positive experiences for the entire team.

If your sales meetings are typically focused on reviewing the budget pacing numbers and other housekeeping notes, then WOW are you missing a great opportunity. Sales meetings are a great place to do sales training or sales warm ups.

While most sales managers agree with this, they often share that one of the reasons they don’t do that sort of activity is because they don’t have time to prepare. Clients of The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) often use one of the “sales meeting kits, ” but not everyone has that available to them. So, if you're looking for some content to enliven your next sales meeting, here are four TED talks that we recommend.

Someone once said that perceptions can’t be wrong because it’s a perception, an opinion and impression of someone else. However, perceptions are often wrong because if they were right, they would be called facts.  

Whether we deserve it or not, we’re judged by every person that we connect with. The words that come out of our mouth firmly establish an imaginary tattoo on our forehead as we stand in front of a quality prospect.

Perception is everything, and how you’re seen by your team, prospects, and clients is a key to success. New research shows that you have 27 seconds to make a positive impression and 1 minute to prove value in any given situation. Like it or not, how you look, dress, and speak helps people to form an opinion of you.