How to Improve Sales Through Collaboration

How to Improve Sales Through Collaboration

Too many meetings are wasted time for salespeople and their clients.

Note: This is the second in a series of articles about using collaboration to craft a better sales strategy. Read Part I here.

Does your team know how to plan a sales meeting that grows the client relationship and moves the sale forward? Many teams don't. Recently, we spoke with a manager charged with developing the sales force for multi-billion dollar company. "We have a world-class sales force," she said, "but we still have people here that can't create a agenda, can't name their desired outcomes of their meetings, and don't know how to achieve those outcomes. They think they can just get by on their charm, but it's irritating our customers and making us lose sales time."

In order to avoid these pitfalls, it's essential to plan sales meetings that maximize everyone's time, employ collaboration, and move the sale forward. Here are four basic starting points for planning a successful meeting.

1) Be clear about the meeting's purpose.
Why are you meeting? Too many meetings are wasted time for salespeople and their clients. If you and your client can't succinctly sum up the meeting's purpose, maybe you don't really need one.

Reasons to meet include:
- Providing an introduction to your organization.
- Exploring the fit between a client's business needs and your capabilities.
- Presenting or reviewing a proposal.
- Kicking off a pilot project the client will use to evaluate your product or service.

Reasons not to meet include:
- Gathering information that you could get in other ways.
- Meeting with someone who's unable to move the process forward.

2) Know your desired outcomes.
What do you want to accomplish by the end of the meeting? Deciding this constitutes your biggest leverage in using everyone's time wisely. Plus, it provides an excellent chance to practice collaboration. It's easy to develop desired outcomes in conjunction with your client. Ideally, share your desired outcomes in advance, but even sharing them at the start of the meeting will help things run smoothly and avoid miscommunication. Try writing down your desired outcomes to make sure they're brief, specific, and measurable and written from the perspective of the participants.

Potential desired outcomes include:
-A shared understanding of client needs and the proposed solution so that we can assess the fit,
-Agreement on whether we will move forward together,
-A list of next steps.

3) Choose the right meeting participants.
Who should be at the meeting? Last time, we discussed a how to identify potential stakeholders: decisionmakers, team members affected by your meeting's outcome, and people with the ability to block or assist a decision.

For any sales meeting, you can use your desired outcomes to narrow the list of attendees to just the essential stakeholders. For example, if one of your desired outcomes is for the client to make a decision on whether to buy your product, make sure the key influencers and ultimate decision-makers from the client side are present.

4) Plan an agenda.
How will you process all the topics most effectively in your limited meeting time? An agenda is more than a list of items to discuss. It's a way of organizing how you'll address them. Things to consider when planning an agenda include: the sequence of topics, who will facilitate each item, meeting attendees' roles, how much time you'll spend on each issue, what the decisionmaking process is, and the ground rules or norms for your discussion. Addressing these start-up items at the beginning of a meeting can prevent the discussion from going off track. For a truly collaborative sales process, create the agenda with your client ahead of time: you'll prevent surprises and help the meeting go smoothly.

Collaborating with clients is a way to create mutual satisfaction from the sales process.