The purpose of a sales meeting is to motivate your people and get them prepared to focus on selling. All too often sales meetings become boring lectures, repetitive messages that really have nothing to do with selling your products, and then becomes a source of de-motivation rather than motivation and increased sales. Sales meetings that are unplanned are punishment for those that have to attend.
Sales meetings should be delivered every day and provide the team with information that gives them new hope and new solutions that will help them in increasing business. Most companies agree with daily sales meetings but then don't have them because they lack fresh and compelling content and soon find the meetings to be a waste of time. For sales meetings to be effective you must invest time and energy in making them interesting over and over again. The purposes of the meeting is not for the sake of a sales meeting but to: (1) Bring the team together and get cohesiveness as a selling team. (2) To motivate and provide the sales and management with hope of what is possible. (3) Prepare individual sales people with new techniques and solutions that will actually increase sales.
These meetings must be kept fresh, motivating, engage the audience and be upbeat. It's important that you don't waste your salespeoples' time, but also avoid overloading them with information that is just information. The meeting should be short, inspiring, provoking, positive and focused on SOLUTIONS! The key to almost any successful meeting is to make it interesting, useful, positive and short. Short means under twenty minutes.
Before you rally the troops for another sales meeting, consider some of the following ways to get the most out of your sales meetings:
a) Get the meeting off to a jump start and surprise your team with visual content that sets the stage and grabs their full attention. Use high impact video to make points, something that can really wake them up and get your team thinking. Here is an example of a wake up video called, You Can't Handle the Truth Sales Meeting. Don't just talk to people get their senses engaged, get them focused, and wakes them up! The major goal of the sales meeting is to offset the massive amounts of negative information your team has received in the last 24 hours from mass media.
b) Once you have their full attention then next focus on 'saving' business that was worked over the last days or weeks. The goal here is to get them thinking how we as a team can piece a transaction together and get the day started on a fast track.
c) Focus on the 'wins not the losses! Take a few minutes at every meeting to congratulate salespeople for any and all completed goals, closed deals, and successes. Praise reinforces positive behavior and encourages everyone to do well. Keep the discussion relevant and don't allow people to present problems unless they also have potential solutions.
Sales meetings should be daily, short, engaging, entertaining and interesting and focused on solutions and the positive not the negative. Your people are being trained whether you train them or not. The question is will you provide them with sales training daily or will you let the media train them. An effective sales meeting will motivate, entertain, engage and get your people focused on how to conquer sales. An effective sales meeting done on a daily basis will prove a great investment of time and energy when done correctly.
When it comes to marketing, maintaining a very good brand always allows a certain product to stand out from the rest. It defines it, and gives it a certain position in the entire pie of the market.
But let's assume you agree with me -- branding matters. If you think your company has a brand...how do you evaluate whether or not it's a good one?
Here are some criteria we use with clients when helping them either discover their brand or critique the one they have in place.
If you can say "yes, that's my brand" to most of these criteria -- you have a brand that will endure and that your employees, customers and community will embrace and support. But if you can't get a 10 out of 12 on this little test (it requires quite a bit of candor) then you know it's back to the drawing board.
To read more click the source below.
Features and Benefits – What’s the big difference?
I remember my Sales Manager told me this before, “convert our product features into customer benefits and ultimately increase the number of productive calls you make in a day”.
Now I would like to rephrase what my Sales Manager said, “a product’s Feature can only describe or tell what the product is all about, but only custom-fit Benefits can convince the prospect to buy”. Of course, the features can certainly create a buyer’s interest but until a salesperson can convert that interest into custom-fit benefits, the buyer is still considered a prospect because he has not made up his mind into buying the product.
To make it simple, let’s define it this way – “Features only tell and custom-fit Benefits sell”.
Here are some examples
Features:
- has vitamins A & B
- automatic timer
- auto lock system
Translating this into benefits:
- Mr. Prospect our product is filled with vitamins A & B which will greatly make your kids stronger and healthier, therefore saving you cost for buying additional benefits (like vitamins or medicines).
- Mr. Prospect with the automatic timer settings in our air conditioner, you have the freedom to turn off the system by itself and then save electricity
- Mr. Prospect with our new auto lock system, you do not have to worry of leaving your car unlocked since you can choose a time delay for the automatic locking
Actually the great sales trainer Dick Gardner said it best, “features cost us money and benefits takes home the money”. While both are crucial for the sales process, the conversion of the features into benefits should be the main focus of a salesperson’s persuasion in the prospect’s mind.
Let me end this lesson by telling you a story.
Back when I was an Account Specialist for one of the biggest ice cream brands in the
On the weekends I joined an insurance company that sell investments, mutual funds, term-life insurance, health care, and death plans. I went there for three consecutive weekends to undergo training for different plan presentations. They taught us how to make a prospect’s list, how to get an appointment and etcetera. After that I was on my own to sell. Since I had a regular list of customers, thanks to my day job, I scheduled for an appointment with one of my closest customers who has an ice-cream shop (in the
In my sales call, my presentation was superb. I was following what my sales insurance mentor taught me. I pushed for the higher benefit plans. I mentioned good examples and situations. I felt I had him in the palm of my hands but suddenly when I tried to close, he would not buy.
I got confused. He told me so many reasons why it was not good to buy, and one big reason he told me was “your products are good but I don’t think it can do anything for me”. When I heard those words, I immediately realized that I was not acting as a co-buyer to the customer.
It dawned on me that I was just presenting to him and mentioned only other people’s stories but I never really converted it to his personal Benefits. I knew then that I have to give him what he needs. Then I remembered this phrase “Features tell, Benefits sell”. So with that in mind, I immediately went back to the first stage of negotiation. I went through all the presentation again and this time I mentioned the features and custom-fit benefits that he would gain from it.
I ended up selling my first insurance sale, and gaining one important lesson that I will never forget.
Again it is this simple, “Features tell, Benefits Sell”.
Well that’s it for today. Join me again for my next coming post.
Dedicated to your selling success,
Sales
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SALESPERSON. What does it really mean?
Wikipedia defined it as a person representing an organization or person in business.
Thesaurus offered a couple of synonyms like abettor, assignee, attorney, broker, commissioner, doer, executor, go-between, handler, negotiator, operator, proctor, promoter, salesperson.
Finally, the very dependable Mr. Webster defined salesperson as a person employed to sell merchandise (as to customers in a store or to customers that are visited).
Now for my highly intellectual definition (at least that’s the way my wife puts it).
Let’s break it into two parts.
Sales – a transaction involving a transfer or exchange of goods/services/merchandise that has an equivalent value to both parties often relating to a transfer of money.
Person – Human being/individual/someone/personality. Obviously we all know what a person is, unless you are a 3-yr old kid who hasn’t started school yet.
Add it up together and we’ll easily get the definition of a Salesperson which is an individual who ensures the proper and successful transaction of the exchange in goods with the equivalent money. In other words, he is the one who is doing the actual selling process (more on this on my next blogs) and bringing home the bacon for the company.
However, only a few people have discovered the fact that all of us have the ability to sell. In fact, in most of the routine things we do in a day, we are actually “selling”. We sell stories to our friends like gossiping about actors daily and trying to “persuade” them to believe us by using what we heard from Kris Aquino or Boy Abunda (like the change in love teams between Bea Alonzo/John Lloyd to Sarah Geronimo/John Lloyd). Like the way wives convince their husbands in buying stuff for the house (c’mon, when does an expensive vase became a necessity?) Or when we arrive home late, stinking like we just came out of a beer bath and still we painstakingly convince our wives that we just had a few drinks after work when in fact it took us an hour just to start the car. Heck, even our kids “sales talk” their way on us when they need a new Transformers toy that their classmates already have.
Personally, I consider selling as a day to day activity that it is almost how human life revolves. When we transfer our ideas to another person regardless if he receives it or not, it is already a kind of sales call.
My point - we are all Salespersons in our little way, we are just not that aware of it. But as long as there is an exchange of ideas, we are selling and we are earning whether it is a person’s trust, love, a toy, and for the common aspect of a Salesperson - money.
Well, that’s it for today. Be sure to leave your email addresses and click to follow button so you can get my newsletter updates.
That's it for today, I hope to hear from you in the future.
Dedicated to you selling success!
Sales Mentor TM
Have you ever heard these following questions?
If these are the kind of questions you think about daily, then we are currently in the same shoes – the Sales and Direct Marketing business.
I am writing this to you; to those sales people who have experienced the hardships, the happiness, the pain and as well as the great rewards of being a sales person.
Whether you are selling a popular product or trying to sales talk your mother to let you take her car to the party - I’ll be your online sales guide and sales mentor. Together, we will learn the scientific and proven techniques to effectively persuade our “customers” and have a blast practicing and applying what we have learned.
That's it for now, you will be hearing from me on the next coming days.
Dedicated to your selling success!
Sales Mentor Online
