happy
Happy Meeting Syndrome
If I had a nickel for every time I heard the word “great” when a salesperson described how a “sales meeting” went, I would be rich. Although dated, the expression captures people mistakenly equating activity with progress. Every planned interaction with a lead should have specific objectives that map to moving the lead further down the sales funnel, and a sales meeting is “great” only when it accomplishes the objectives.
Most sales organizations follow a qualification or sales methodology such as MEDDPICC, Challenger, or SPIN. They pair the sales methodology with a sales process that defines the specific steps the sales teams should take to convert a lead into a customer (journey). Lastly, each of the steps in the sales process is often paired with a tool or tactic that assists in accomplishing the task and the whole process is tracked with meaningful metrics.
The happy meeting syndrome (“great”) starts to creep in when the sales process steps are too generic (i.e. demonstration) and are neither customized for your solution and market, nor indicative of progress as measured by customer feedback. Below, we walk through a customized sales process for an enterprise B2B software solution for creating and managing intranets.
Although the intranet solution fit into an existing software category, the market was still early, and so our lead generation approach was much closer to missionary then commodity. This meant we usually needed, and could financially justify, having reps spend time on the BAT part of BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline) with our lead qualification criteria based solely on Need.
At this stage in the sales process, a meeting was considered “great” when our sponsor agreed to host the discovery session and conditionally agreed, assuming the results were worthy, to host a meeting with the executives who owned this area of the business to review the BVA and watch the day in the life demonstration. As a side note, as the BVA and the day in the life demonstration required an investment on our side, we would often look to have a manager or executive from our team meet the sponsor or the sponsor’s manager (depending on level) to ensure we were on track.
At the conclusion of the meeting with the executives we asked about the two next steps in our sales process:
Join a final meeting where we pulled everything together and presented a proposal for the project.
Identify and introduce us to other parties that would need to be involved and or approve the project so that we could ensure our proposal was complete.
Learning point – always ask for a meeting to present and review the proposal.
Given we often needed to create justification for our solution, our first step in the sales process was to create enough interest and excitement that our contact became an advocate. An advocate meant the person had enough knowledge to help us pull together a back of the envelope ROI calculation and was excited enough to help us find a sponsor (someone who had the authority or knowledge to bring forward a project requiring an investment greater than $500,000). At this stage in the sales process, a meeting was considered “great” when our contact explicitly agreed to be an advocate.
Learning point – by asking the lead if they agreed to be an advocate, we incorporated the lead’s input into judging if we were progressing through the sales funnel.
After we progressed from creating an advocate and then a sponsor, our next milestone in our sales process revolved around gaining agreement from the sponsor to host a one-to-two-day discovery session. A discovery session involved learning enough about the customer’s processes, data integration points, costs, and future vision for how the customer wanted to work that we could create a custom day in the life presentation and produce a business value assessment (BVA). An additional benefit for the sponsor was that the discovery session produced a fully scoped project document that was not tied to a specific vendor.
Learning point – it might take many meetings, demonstrations, and other actions to get the sponsor to the point of agreeing to a discovery session but the milestone, and what we measured in our pipeline progression, was agreeing to host a discovery session (distinguishing pipeline metrics from measurements a manager might track for coaching)
The BVA and custom demonstration results almost always needed additional work after being presented to the sponsor. Although this lengthened our sales cycle, the production of the assets became a joint effort and increased buy-in. Once the updates were finished, we moved to the next step of having our sponsor host a meeting to review the BVA and present the day in the life to the executives who owned the business area.
Learning point – most organizations have some matrix structure so there are multiple decision makers and we tried to get ahead of the curve by asking to meet with legal, finance, IT, etc. prior to making a formal proposal.
Our final steps in the sales process were to present the proposal and to ask for an executive sponsor from both teams to assist with the final negotiations and to be executive sponsors for the project once started.
Conclusion
In conclusion, your sales process should reflect your product and market. It is usually not a question of too few or too many steps, but that the steps are indicative of progress based on feedback from the lead.
The process steps are important but what is even more important is to establish a culture of progression and metrics. I once worked for a CEO who would walk the floor and ask, “how are you doing”. The CEO was not looking to hear how you were feeling or what you did for the weekend, but for the sales rep to respond by saying what deals would hit milestones by the end of the week and where the rep was MTD and QTD. “Great” was not an acceptable answer.
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