Do you think your sales team sees value in your meetings and walks away feeling empowered to improve? This was a question I posed to a group of contractors at the Home Performance Contractor Success Symposium in Burlington, Vermont in October. I found some powerful takeaways from the discussion I led on Getting More from Your Sales Meeting. Below are some things I thought would be useful for all Pearl Contractors who want to make their teams more effective:
Define the goals of your sales meeting and set the agenda: Understand what is important to you and your sales team and set your agenda around that. The goals you set will translate into an agenda that your team owns. Here are a few things I found particularly useful and am deploying in my business now:
Telling stories makes the message more memorable, and effective: The sales meeting is not a time for formal reporting of last week’s numbers — you have a CRM for that! Formal reporting of numbers and getting lectured from leadership is demoralizing for even the strongest of salesperson. It also establishes one-way communication from management down. Instead, have informal sharing of successes and struggles from each salesperson where the Sales Manager leads Q&A. OneSpot reported that stories are 22x more memorable than listing facts. Your sales team will retain successful techniques more when they hear them as stories from their peers instead of lectures from you.
Role play scenarios. We all have heard this over and over. The research doesn’t lie – it works. Use the meeting time to practice techniques with peers, leadership, or other co-workers through role play. Role play can be daunting, so give your team the scenarios ahead of the meeting and expect them to come to the meeting prepared. Pull topics from a hat, practice how you explain the benefits of Pearl to your clients, reference one of the struggles shared from the previous week, or pick one of these scenarios from HubSpot. Keep the topics relevant and your feedback positive. When someone does mess up, stop the role play and provide instant feedback so the situation is still relevant in the salesperson’s mind and begin the role play again from the beginning.
Keep it relevant and engaging. A recent study from Atlassian found that 91% of meeting goers daydream during a meeting. Keep your topics relevant and keep the meeting interactive to keep your team engaged. Encourage information sharing, plan exercises and activities to implement improvement steps. Keep it interesting by rotating who runs the meeting, having a debate between sales staff on lowering or raising prices, bringing in a guest speaker, or report out on a chapter of a sales book.
Improving your sales meeting was just one of the topics discussed between some of the country’s top home performance contractors gathered at the Home Performance Success Symposium, sponsored by Pearl Certification. These types of business discussions between non-competing contractors take place regularly in Peer Groups. If you would like to learn more about joining a Home Performance Peer Group fill out a company profile form or contact me at [email protected]. Fix More Homes!
This blog post was provided by Amanda Godward, owner of Ecotelligent Homes, a Michigan based home performance contractor. They are a Pearl Partner Contractor servicing Metro Detroit with energy audits and energy efficient home improvements.
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