The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

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.

Looking to climb out of that waste-of-time-sales-meeting rut and grab everyone’s attention with your highly productive and engaging meetings? 

It is no secret that the weekly sales meeting has plummeted to the bottom of the priority list for many salespeople. In many offices, it has become a routine exchange of housekeeping issues that could have been shared over email instead. Don’t get me wrong, you need to go over housekeeping issues from time to time, but taking an entire sales staff off the streets is a costly way to cover these items on a regular basis. Take a minute and do the math. How much does a one-hour sales meeting really cost you? That number will probably frighten you into ratcheting up the quality of your weekly get-together, so let’s get started.

Here are five powerful ways to jump-start your sales meetings and bring them to a whole new level:

IMAGINE THIS: After countless attempts to connect with a prospect, your persistence has paid off. You did it! You've got the meeting on the calendar, you are feeling great! Now, you have one chance to make a great first impression, and it needs to count. Luckily, you have a few days to prepare so you can ensure the meeting runs smoothly and the prospect views you as a trusted and valued partner.

While it’s important to prepare yourself for the meeting, you also want to prepare the prospect. This is one thing that salespeople often overlook prior to a meeting. Most prospects are going to expect you to come in and tell them why they need to buy your product or service. It’s up to you to go out of your way to be sure they know you are different and you are not going to do that. Don't just prepare yourself... also prepare your prospect.