Wherever you are in the sales cycle, it’s crucial to maximize your selling team’s time to get the results everyone desires. Your selling team is your internal resources – the people you rely on every day to help you work sales opportunities that have a high percentage shot of closing. And those resources are shared, so they are often stretched thin.

Time is Opportunity

Each sales call or client meeting with a potential client is an opportunity to qualify a deal and move it forward. You know how difficult it can be to schedule a meeting with a potential key stakeholder. So, when you bring others into the process – that is, the precious internal resources that everyone wants a piece of – you want to maximize everyone’s time.

Sales is all about time and opportunity. With so much on the line, why would you only prepare for the next call or meeting just 10 or 30 minutes before picking up the phone or walking through the door? These last-minute briefings usually involve the lead sales person conducting a quick download session to his/her selling team in an attempt to give them a clue about a client they have scarcely heard of before.

More often than not, this leads to disaster: not knowing the objective of the meeting, inconsistent messages, flimsy responses to objections, sloppy materials, and the wrong people addressing the wrong questions – and worse, bad impressions and lost opportunities.

5 Tips to Make It Flawless

Team-based, role selling demands greater orchestration among your internal resources and requires the right amount of preparation. That means you’ll likely need different approaches and messages for each key stakeholder on your buyer’s side; and the right people on your team working together to provide these.

Take the time to get the preparation right:

1. Agree on the outcome.  Discuss and agree on what you are collectively trying to achieve upfront, based on your confirmed knowledge of the potential buyer’s desired outcome of the call or meeting.
2. Discuss each of your roles. For example: Who is the lead spokesperson? Who will handle issues related to pricing? Who will handle technical questions? Who will discuss support services?
3. Prepare open-ended questions. Now that you have quality time with the prospective buyer, utilize the time wisely to fill in any missing information needed to move the opportunity forward. Make a list of open-ended questions and agree on who should ask them based each person’s role in that particular call or meeting.
4. Anticipate and discuss questions and objections. Only then will you know in advance how you will address them. Again, decide who will answer each potential question that may get asked.
5. Prepare and practice your presentation. If you’re giving a presentation, make sure your materials are complete and are cohesive in look and format. Ensure everyone on your selling team has an adequate chance to review it and provide comments. Then, as a team, rehearse the whole presentation, get more feedback and view it as if you are the buyers. A good rule of thumb: If the meeting is one hour, prepare for at least one hour. Your “final” dry run should be flawless.

Engage Your Selling Team

Assembling a team of resources costs time and money. Therefore, it’s important that your selling team is always engaged and contributing to the process. It will ensure both sides of the deal reach their desired outcomes of each call or meeting. Doing that takes preparation. Look at your previous sales calls, meetings and presentations. Then ask yourself if you are doing all you can do to maximize your selling team’s time – and your potential buyer’s time – and get those epic results.