3 Tips On How to Upgrade The Impact of Your Sales Advances
We’ve been discussing brainstorming advances and how to make the advances you suggest even stronger. Here are three more ways to strengthen the sales advances you suggest.
Pick the best possible location for your meeting. Your meeting venue can make a meeting more or less effective to a very large degree. There are no hard and fast rules, but consider the setting for each of the following:
Choose The Right Venue
- Reference Client Site – If you can arrange your meeting with a prospective client to take place at an existing client’s location (aka reference client), odds are the effectiveness of your meeting will greatly increase. The environment will be oozing social proof and your prospect will have direct access to an existing client for third-party validation of your solution.
- Event or Show – This can help or hurt depending on circumstances. Trade shows can be convenient for prospects, but one of the logistics that make it convenient is the proximity of competitors and alternate choices. Trade shows also present many potential distractions. Nevertheless, such events often create excitement and high energy levels that can be motivating for prospective clients. If it is your own event (such as a user-group meeting), then you have a meeting trifecta: heightened energy, access to your top personnel, and social proof all around you. If you do use a company event or trade show to conduct a meeting, plan it carefully so that distractions are minimized during the actual time you meet.
- Your Corporate Office – Having your prospective client visit your office or headquarters is a great way to showcase the leadership of your management team as well as the talent of your technical, implementation, and support teams. Meeting at your corporate office will help address questions regarding your company’s credibility, competency, or capabilities to solve or execute the solution. A well-choreographed visit to your office or headquarters can strengthen your advance significantly.
- The Prospective Client’s Site – Meeting at the prospect’s location is far stronger than an internet-based meeting or phone conference. Moving from a virtual meeting to an actual on-site meeting will greatly strengthen both an engagement and an advance. A prospect’s site may also come with potential interruptions however. If interruptions are a real possibility, then it may make sense to shoot for a meeting off-site.
- Off-site Location – The primary benefit of off-site meeting locations is to eliminate interruptions and allow prospective clients to focus better on your message. A dedicated retreat to a resort can create maximum focus but may not be practical. On the other hand, a simple lunch or dinner off site can be a mixed bag — sometimes good, sometimes not. Going off site does have limitations. The opportunity to add additional parties or explore their premises is eliminated. Sometimes you can accomplish an on-site and off-site meeting in the same encounter (e.g., a tour of their premises and then a lunch meeting). Plan your off-site meetings strategically. When executed well, off-site locations can improve the quality of your meeting.
Add valuable people to your meeting. The involvement of key people either from your company or the prospect’s company can strengthen your meeting (which may be an advance in itself) as well as the action items and advances that result from it. This can include key decision makers, technical resources, domain experts, or even existing clients.
Add value to every interaction. Strengthen every encounter by adding value in some way. By making each meeting inherently worthwhile, you train your prospects and clients to value every interaction with you. There are many ways to achieve this and how to do this effectively will be the subject of our upcoming posts.
Closing Tip: With a little planning you can increase the impact of each advance and sales encounter.
Until next time!
James
