Ian Altman discusses the biggest blind spot in sales meetings: lack of preparation. He emphasizes the importance of setting realistic goals aligned with the client's needs rather than unrealistic expectations. Altman advises salespeople to identify what clients need to believe to achieve their goals and to prepare for different meeting scenarios (the good, the bad, and the ugly). Role-playing these scenarios with different team members helps salespeople practice and improve their ability to handle various outcomes effectively. He concludes that thorough planning and realistic expectations lead to better client meeting outcomes.
Ian Altman 0:02
Ian, welcome to the Same Side Selling podcast. I am your host. Ian Altman, what's the biggest single blind spot when sales people prepare for client meetings? So I hear from reps all the time. I work with hundreds of reps every month, and we talk about where they fall down in different pursuits. And oftentimes people tell me, Well, my biggest challenge is getting a meeting with people. So I spend all this time working on different strategies and how I'm going to get a meeting. And in the Same Side Selling Academy, we give you all sorts of different ways to approach that. We have a cold outreach playbook that talks about how we get there. That's all good and well. So you finally get a meeting. You show up at the meeting, and it doesn't quite go as planned. In fact, you envision the meeting being great and the client handing over a briefcase or a wheelbarrow full of cash. But it didn't work out that way. Why not? Well, here's the single greatest blind spot that I find salespeople have, and it comes down to this. And I could give you 10 different ones, but this is the biggest one. It comes down to preparation. What do I mean by that? I asked reps all the time, so you have a meeting with this prospect, right? Yeah, you worked hard to get that meeting right? Yeah. What's your goal for the meeting? And usually the goal is something that doesn't make a lot of sense, or it's entirely self serving. So I'll say, What's your goal for the meeting? They say, Oh, well, I want to get an order from these guys for $2 million okay, great. Is that a realistic goal? Well, I don't know, but it'd be great to get that Okay, so what does the client need to believe in order for you to achieve that outcome? Well, what do you mean? What does the client need to believe? I mean, if this is your goal for the meeting, you want the client to conclude that they should do millions of dollars in business with you. What do they need to believe in order for that to happen? So there's a couple things that we see as glaring mistakes. The first is an unrealistic expectation that has to do with your desires rather than solving the client's needs. So that's the first thing we need to focus on, what is the client hopefully trying to accomplish, and how do we get to that? Then we want to look at okay, once we have a realistic expectation, now what we want to ask ourselves is, Okay, if that's the realistic expectation, then now what does the client need to believe in order for that to happen? And now we get to ask ourselves an important question, which is, what are the questions we would need to ask to help our client conclude that outcome? So if the client needs to believe a certain thing, what are the questions we can ask to confirm if they believe that or if they don't? Because effective sales is not about persuasion or coercion, effective sales is about getting to the truth as quickly as possible. If you want to get top results for your team, take a look at these Same Side Selling Academy. Just visit same sideselling.com to learn more. So the big mistake that people usually make is they don't have any planning whatsoever. The second big mistake is they have unrealistic expectations. And the third one is they haven't thought through all the logistics of the meeting to think they're to think through in the client's head, what do they need to believe in order for their goal to be realized? So now that we've done that, now we say, Okay, here's what the client needs to believe, and here are the questions I'm going to ask. Then, when you want to ask yourself is, what are the three most likely ways this meeting could go? Because it's never just one way. I want you to think about almost like the old Clint Eastwood movie, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. If everything goes smoother the way you want it to, that would be the good. If everything goes like a little bit sideways, not exactly the way you want it to, that would be the bad and the ugly would be. What if we're really not aligned? How might that go? And then we can ask ourselves, okay, in each of those scenarios, what questions would we ask? How would we handle those different situations to maximize the chance of us getting to the truth as quickly as possible. We can't manufacture a need if the client doesn't have it. We can't We can't convince them that we're the right answer when we're not. All we can do in sales is get to the truth as quickly as possible. So now that we've got this and we say, Okay, here's what the client needs to believe. Here are the questions I'm going to ask. Here are the three different ways, the good, the bad, the ugly, of how this meeting might go. Now we need to role play each scenario, and in each role play, just like our same side improv game. There are three different characters. We have a sales person, we have a customer, and we have an observer. The observer alone. Times the most in each round. But what we do now is the person playing the sales person could be the sales person could be somebody else on the team. It doesn't matter. The bottom line is, we want to play out multiple times each of those three scenarios. And you don't have to tell the person playing the seller which scenario is in play. You just have to know that during the course of this you're going to play each of those scenarios multiple times. What this means is that now we've thought about what our intention is and what our goal is for the meeting. We've thought about what the client needs to believe in order to achieve that outcome, and now we have practiced and rehearsed the three most likely ways the meeting could go. So do you think you'll get a better outcome? Of course you will, because now you're prepared to deal with the with each scenario. The important thing is this, you should rehearse the scenario where it turns out the client is not a good fit, and you determine that as quickly as possible, we don't want to waste their time or our time if someone's not a fit, but if they are a good fit, we want to make sure that we can concisely get to the right information help them build a business case so they believe, wow, I'm better off working with you than somebody else. So in summary, here are the things to watch out for. You can't come to a meeting with no expectations, when you can't have unrealistic expectations. Instead, what we need to do is we need to plan. We need to think about, What's my goal for the meeting? Is it realistic? If that's a goal, what does the customer need to believe in order for that outcome to be achieved? What are the questions we can ask to help them achieve that? And then what's the good, the bad and the ugly scenarios? Role play each of those in practice. And I'm confident that if you do this, you'll achieve better outcomes and results in your client meetings. If there are sales situations that you're stuck in, just drop me a note to Ian at Ian altman.com check out our Same Side Selling Academy at Same Side, Selling academy.com, we'll see on the next episode of the Same Side Selling podcast. So long you.
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