In today’s market, sales reps compete for customers’ attention and time. Prospects’ schedules have become increasingly busy, giving reps limited time to pitch their value and product to move deals forward. In order to close deals and drive revenue, sales meetings must be productive and dynamic. So, how can you optimize your brief sales meetings to positively impact prospects and ultimately move conversations forward?
Pre-Meeting Preparation:
Do Your Homework
Be informed. Know exactly what is happening in your customer’s industry. According to a Forrester Buyer Insight study, only 13 percent of executive buyers believe that a salesperson can clearly show they understand their business issues and articulate a way to solve them. Set yourself apart from your competitors by familiarizing yourself with your customers’ needs, their industry’s latest market trends, and how your solution both aligns with and will add value to their future plans.
Have The Right Content On-Hand
A successful sales meeting relies on the accessibility of enticing and informative content in a timely manner. Companies create marketing content to communicate their product offerings, educate their sales teams and ultimately win customers over. Unfortunately, sales frequently have a hard time finding this content to use in their sales meetings. In fact, a study by Sirius Decisions shows that 60-70 percent of marketing content goes unused by sales reps. Clearly, this lack of content organization is resulting in wasted marketing resources, and leaves reps ill-equipped for their sales conversations.
Lacking important content and information in a timely manner negatively affects credibility among prospects, leading to stagnant sales conversations. Instead, move sales conversations forward by accessing your important sales content quickly. Mobile sales enablement tools will enable you to find the content you need, any time, any where, on any device.
During The Meeting:
Ask Questions
Ask questions, ask questions, ask questions. More often than not, prospects will provide you with all of the information you need to successfully sell to them. By asking your customers open-ended questions, you’ll be able to gain visibility into their pain points and needs and approach your next steps in the sales process strategically.
Keep It Focused
Customers lose interest when the content of your sales interaction lies outside of their company scope. Focus the sales conversation on their pain points and how your product will significantly alleviate them. By focusing on your prospects’ pain points during sales meetings, you’ll introduce a sense of urgency and need for a solution. Present your product wisely, first highlighting the product features relevant to their needs.
Keep Customers Engaged
Customers hear hundreds of different product pitches each week. Make your product memorable and give them an opportunity to engage.
The use of PDFs, Word documents, and pamphlets is neither effective nor engaging. Get creative, tell a story. Partner with your marketing team to create dynamic content that you and your prospects can both interact with. Avoid pitching long lists of statistics and numbers. Educate your prospect through a story-telling format instead.
According to marketing authors Dan and Chip Heath, 63 percent of meeting attendees remember stories, while only five percent remember statistics. By using HTML5 files, audio, videos or playbooks in your presentation strategy, you’ll make your presentation come to life; emphasizing your product’s value and keeping your prospect’s interest. When prospects can take part in and interact with your sales presentation, they’re likely to be more engaged. Customer engagement will ensure an ongoing conversation to ultimately close more deals.
Post Meeting:
Relevant Follow-Up
Regardless of how well you might feel your actual sales meeting went, do you have any way to accurately gauge prospect’s interest to determine next steps? Are your prospects interacting with the content you’ve shared with them, or is it lying on their desk or in their inbox untouched?
With actionable tracking and insights, you’ll gain a much better idea of your prospects’ interest in your product. Utilize a sales enablement solution like Showpad. Showpad will allow you to track user engagement post meetings. Such solutions will provide sales reps with insights into prospects’ interest level and track their interaction with your sales content. These analytics significantly assist reps with timely and relevant follow-up.
In closing, three key ingredients for successful customer-centric selling are: pre-meeting preparation, customer-centric sales meetings, and strategic post-meeting follow-up. By improving the overall quality of your sales meetings, you’re guaranteed to see a positive impact on your success in the field.
This article originally appeared on the Showpad blog.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Customer-Centric Selling
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