What are the five meeting objectives you should avoid as a salesperson?

Make no mistake, getting a meeting is the most important part of a sales cycle, as without it you wouldn’t even have a sales cycle. To learn about how to secure that first meeting, read my blog on the subject of cold calling. Cold calling isn’t the only way to get a meeting but an important way nevertheless. So you have the meeting you have been looking for. And now you have to make it count as the next step of your sales cycle depends on it. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of preparation but to get on with it, you should know your objectives. Before we look at goals you should be targeting, let’s check out the non-goals you should be aware of. 

These are NOT your objectives out of the meeting: 

1. Giving your presentation:

As stated in the prelude, just heading to the meeting and presenting is not the goal at all. The reason you have secured the meeting is to move to the next step. Remember, you make a sale only when you keep marching on your sales cycle. One misstep and you are starting all over again. Preparation is a key, but not just concentrated on how and what you’ll speak.  

2. Talking about your solution:

You should certainly talk about why you are in the meeting and what you have to showcase. But again, that’s not the objective of your meeting. Keep in mind that we are looking at it from a sales perspective. Just talking about the solution is not reason enough for the prospect to reach back for you and order your solution. Hence just mentioning the features and things it can achieve should not be your take away from the meeting  

3. Understanding the customers pain points:

If you have read my blog on this subject, you will know that I have my reservations on this subject already. In short: understanding customer pain points is good for the initial stages of your career, as that helps you solve the problem that you hear from the customer directly. What it doesn’t do is give you the ability to grow in your profession whereby you can offer solutions and create an environment that the customer doesn’t imagine is possible. A classic example is Apple. In the year 2007, everything was great in terms of the cellphone market. People were happy getting higher configuration phones which were good in doing what telephones were meant to do for decades (and maybe click some pictures). But Apple launched its iPhone with a marketplace and applications residing on the smartphone. Changing the industry forever. I don’t intend to suggest that every sale should be an industry changer, but just having the perspective in your mind will enhance the way you approach a prospect with a solution  

4. Updating the progress:

Keeping in touch with the customer and updating them on the progress of operations or telling them about how your company or account or product is doing? Isn’t that a part of sales? It sure is, but that’s not your end goal. If all that you do is to make regular calls with your prospect, take them out for lunches/dinners and update them on what your company is accomplishing, you’ll have a lot of good friends but very few sales to your name. Though an important part of establishing rapport, and I do recommend that you do this off and on, but in a corporate environment or a company that is mid or large size, there is a separate team called ‘Delivery’ or ‘Operations’ that specifically do this work. Their job is to make sure that the promises made to the customer are delivered in the stipulated time and money. The progress report and constant interaction is done by this group too.  

5. Explanation, explanation and further explanation:

Let’s go through this scenario. You are excited for this meeting that you have secured after a great deal of effort. You conduct some internal calls and take your best technical experts to explain to the customer what this product is about. You start the meeting and the presentation you had worked hard on. The deck is filled with so much content that to just read it off will take the whole meeting time. You or your tech expert explain every detail about all the slides. You complete the presentation with 15 minutes to spare, and then you are hit with a barrage of questions asking you about all the nitty gritties of the solution that you just showed. You are busy answering the questions and giving even more explanations of why it’s important that the prospect use your solution. And then one of the prospects on the call says that he/she has to drop off or head out as they have something else planned. That becomes a cue for the others to follow suit. You had to wrap the meeting abruptly and didn’t have time to discuss the next steps. Sure you can set up another meeting just to do that, but then you are back to step one of your sales cycle setting up the meeting again. Quite often sales professionals are stuck in a loop of continuously having to explain. The fact of the matter is that if you have to explain your product or solution for such a long time, there is either something missing in your solution or how you have prepared for the meeting. By going through this process endlessly, you are losing on precious time that can be better spent actually making a sale. The same goes for answering questions. Too many of them can derail your opportunity. That’s certainly not an objective that you should be taking away from your meeting.

CONCLUSION 

In an organization, different teams have different objectives and tasks to perform. As a sales professional, your role is to bring in sales. And for this your focus should be on steps that’ll take you there. This is not to say that you can’t indulge in the above activities ever. The essential note is to not get carried away with the activities that don’t take you closer to your goals.