One of the most critical touchpoints in the sales cycle is the meeting. Meetings are where deals are won and lost. They’re so important that sellers spend roughly 70% of their time either preparing, presenting, or following up on them.
Meetings are so high-stakes that it becomes easy for sellers to focus on the meeting itself, leaving prep and follow-up as afterthoughts. But, in reality, effective preparation and rigorous follow-up are the foundations upon which great buyer experiences are built.
If you’re wondering how you or your team can better prepare for meetings, you’re in luck. In this post, we’ll share how you can make the most of your time and craft a memorable experience for your buyers and customers.
Understand the buyer and their needs
First things first: a sales meeting isn’t primarily about making a sale. It’s about developing a relationship with your buyer. It’s important to centre your sales meetings around your customers and their needs. While this isn’t always possible in an introductory meeting, there are small things you can do to tailor your meetings to your audience. And, over time, you can continue to personalise what you share and when, based on your customer’s unique needs.
For an introductory meeting, it’s important to do your research. By searching the buyer’s website, recent news, and pulling relevant insights about their industry, you can demonstrate a high business acumen. For example, if you’re meeting with a prospect from a manufacturing firm, you can start by reviewing their latest earnings report, researching their recent projects, and getting a feel for their competitive landscape.
Conducting this pre-work ensures that you can create a hypothesis for how the meeting will flow. Gathering information on what’s worked for similar customers and prospects can help you prepare effectively. Researching your customer’s pain points, interests, and objectives will enable you to create a personalised agenda that is relevant to your customer and what they hope to achieve.
Get tools to help you prepare, present, and follow-up effectively.
Prepare the right content and knowledge
The pitch deck is the bread and butter of any sales call. Sellers depend on PowerPoint presentations to create a narrative that will guide their meetings. Once you’ve developed an understanding of your customer and their unique needs, begin by gathering the right content. Identify and personalise the most relevant content to help guide the conversation based on your customer’s specific scenario.
Just as content is important to the meeting experience, so, too, is the knowledge your sellers possess. This is where pre-meeting activities like just-in-time learning and virtual practice help ensure sellers have the skills and knowledge necessary to master your talk track and address any questions, objections, and topics that might come up during the meeting. This can also include topics like competitor insights, product features, and your product or service’s value proposition.
Align and collaborate with your sales team
Before any customer-facing meeting – especially high-stakes meetings with executives – it’s important to ensure that every member of your sales team is aligned. Connect with these members to rehearse your pitch, as well as any other scenarios you foresee unfolding during your call.
Use these pre-meeting exercises to fine-tune your approach. Through peer-to-peer dry runs, you may identify opportunities to refine before you’re in front of a buyer. Tools like Seismic Learning enable sellers through just-in-time coaching so they can prepare more intentionally, and with their specific customer needs in mind. And Seismic for Meetings helps sellers collaborate with their deal team and ensure everyone is aligned and well-rehearsed on the agenda and content.
Trust Seismic to prepare for make-or-break meetings
Meeting prep can be a hassle when content and learning exist in multiple different systems, but it doesn’t have to be. The Seismic Enablement CloudÔ provides a single, unified platform for all the tools and content your sales teams need to prepare efficiently.
Effectively prepare for meetings with Seismic’s features such as Meetings, Content, Knowledge, Learning, and more that can help sellers connect the dots on everything they need for the meeting.
Ready to make the most out of every meeting? Download our buyer engagement kit to access tools that will help you prepare, engage, and follow up with your customers. If you’d like to see Seismic in action, please request a demo today.