A sales meeting between your prospect and your sales team is a big moment in B2B sales. It’s no surprise that a poorly conducted meeting can hinder your efforts to earn your customers business but what can be done to help ensure that your sales team conducts a successful meeting?

In this blog I will share with you the tips my colleagues and I use to create a more productive and more successful meetings.  Be sure to try these tips with your sales team to get the most out of your B2B meetings.

Identify Attendees

For any meeting it is always important to know who you are meeting with. When communicating with your prospect to arrange a meeting pay attention to who they mention in conversation or who they cc in an e-mail. Towards the end of your call it is a good idea to ask if anyone else will be attending.

Knowing who is attending your meeting can help you adapt your sales message to appeal to the attendee’s level within the organization and areas of the business that they are responsible for. To enhance the impact of your sales message for try to crack the personality code and sell to your prospects unique interests. LinkedIn’s advanced search can be a helpful tool to find your attending prospects’ profiles in order to gain a more complete understanding of your prospects.

Discuss the Meeting Plan with Your Team

A shared understanding of the meeting will help your sales team work towards reaching the agreed upon goals, ensuring cohesion on what your team is trying to achieve.

Opening up the meeting plan for discussion also allows the opportunity to eliminate any confusion surrounding the nature of the meeting, such as why the prospects are meeting with your organization, or what your organization hopes to accomplish by the end of the meeting. Additionally, your team members can provide feedback to help strengthen the identified probing questions or suggest additional probing questions that should be asked.

Draft a Meeting Plan

The meeting plan is a simple and valuable tool that can be shared with your attending sales team members. The meeting plan clearly answers the when, where, who, why, and what as it related to your meeting.

• When and Where – The time and place of your meeting need to be clear. Showing up on time shows respect and can be a positive start to your meeting.
• Who – Who is attending the meeting? Be sure to include the prospects name, title, and even a link to their LinkedIn profile.
• Why – Why is the prospect meeting with us? Based on your existing interaction with the prospect highlight why they are meeting with your organization and what their goal for the meeting might be.
• What – what is our goal for the meeting? It is important to clearly identify what you and your sales team want to get out of the meeting. By identifying your goals you will be able to measure if your meeting was successful.

For additional information and support on creating a meeting agenda be sure to read our thoughts on our blog post, Sales Meeting Plans Help Start-up Companies Close Faster.

Draft a List of Questions

It is always helpful to consider your probing questions in advance. Using the right questions can help you identify pain points, guide your prospects thinking, and demonstrate an understanding of the industry and your prospects challenges. Be sure to consider SPIN Selling’s 4 powerful types of B2B sales questions when trying to develop the right probing questions.

Identify Your Next Steps

Identifying your next steps goes beyond your goals. Think of your goals as what you would like to achieve within the meeting while the next steps are the actions you want to take place after the meeting has been completed. Next steps could include actions such as providing your prospects with additional information requested from the meeting or drafting a proposal for your prospects consideration.

Your next steps are the most important element to a meeting and should be expressed to and agreed upon with your prospects. It’s good to celebrate a successful meeting but the right next steps keep the relationship moving forward and are the steps you need to take to reach a close and earn the sale.

Successful meetings help lead to successful sales. Be sure to try these 5 tips to help your sales team have more successful and more productive meetings. If you enjoyed this blog but are need more help, be sure to download our sales and marketing white papers. Our white papers’ tips are sure to help you find more opportunities to book meetings and grow your business.