My Best Practices

Don't Screw Your Meeting Up!

You have a very important meeting next week with one of your major customers. Your boss is going to attend as well as a hand-full of other people from your company. How can you make sure everybody will be on the same page and that you or anyone else is not going to screw this meeting up?

The answer is easy: get prepared! Here again, the best way to be ready and in sync with your team is to use a simple model to define and share your objectives prior to the meeting.

This is a simple but quite effective method that I have been using and asking my team to use for years. This is called POP and 4A's, and stands for Purpose, Objectives that are broken down into Actions, Abilities, Acknowledgment and Answers, and Premise. Let's review them one by one.

• Purpose

The first question you have to answer is to define the overall PURPOSE of the meeting. This is the right place to give some background information about the situation, the history of the relationship, the market and the main issues you and your customer have to solve.

Actually I like very much associating it with a Strategic Selling Blue Sheet that summarizes perfectly your situation in a given account for a specific sales opportunity.

• Objectives

Then you have to be more specific about the objectives you want to achieve. This a great topic to be addressed by the team, gathering inputs from all the future attendees to make sure everybody's objectives are listed. The sales department doesn't have the same objectives than the Customer Services or the Project Manager who will be responsible for the deployment. Be as exhaustive as possible.

This is where the 4A's come in play. There are an easy to remember model to cover all kinds of objectives you have to think about.

• Actions

This is the most important one. What do you want your customer TO DO at the end of the meeting?

This could be a myriad of items, from signing a PO to scheduling a demo or a reference visit or another meeting with his own boss... Take a look to your Strategic Selling Blue Sheet and figure out what is missing to improve your chance to win and move to the next step by removing a major red flag.

• Abilities

The second targets the brain of your customer. What do you want him TO UNDERSTAND?

You have to be very factual here and able to prove what you say. What it is that you want him to know and even more, to understand. For example: your product or service is the only one having such a feature; your company is financially rock solid and invests 20% in R&D; you have 1200 satisfied customers and a survey to prove it... Again check out your blue sheet, identify the weaknesses your still have and figure out which are the information that could make your stronger and improve your rating.

• Acknowledgment
  

But your customer doesn't only have a brain, he also has a heart. I mean you cannot always "understand' things but you have sometimes to "believe" them. So the next question to be answered is "What do you want your customer TO BELIEVE at the end of the meeting?

You cannot prove everything you state easily, but there are important factors you wish him to consider: for example your solution is very intuitive to use; or you have one of the best consulting organization in the industry; or you have been winning 60% of the deals against the competitor X or Y. Try to select the points that are direct answers to your customer's main expectations.

• Answers

The final point you have to take care of is to list all the ANSWERS you need from your customer, and then all the questions you have to ask him. Again your Blue Sheet is going to be a great resource to identify the most valuable questions to improve your position within the account. They should all be listed as red flags.

Let's go through a few examples: what is the dead line for the decision? Who are the people involved in the decision making process? How do they rank your solution technically? Financially? What are their precise decision making criteria?

• Premise

A last topic to be in sync on with your team is how you are going to kick off the meeting. What will be the initial PREMISE with which you are going to introduce the meeting to make the objectives clear and create a positive atmosphere?

The best way is to put your-self in your customer's shoes and summarize the current situation, what has happen over the last weeks or months, what you have understood of their pains and expectations, how you can solve them properly and what the remaining issues to be addressed are.

Just give it a try for whatever meeting you have next. This is simple, quick and very effective. You can find the form here. I personally use it as a sanitary check even before a simple phone call to nail down what I really want to achieve. But this is even a better method when you have to prepare a meeting attended by a bunch of different people in your organization. That guarantees that their objectives have been included and that gives to all the participants a clear road map for the meeting.

What Makes Your Team Great? (3/3)

So it is all about people or all about results, isn't it ? No, it is actually all about process!

Processes are the only way to really improve your bottom line and turn your hard work into gold.

Getting the best people in the world aiming all in sync to the same well defined objectives and achieving great results is not enough to really make it on the long run. Sorry... So let's review a few additional ideas here.

 

• Waste time to save time

        Too often people resist to defining and implementing processes because "it is a waste of time". Yes, highly motivated and fired up, they just want to jump in and start working right away. Is time not the essence? But this could be a deadly mistake.

Taking some time to think about HOW you are going to realize WHAT you have just defined at the previous step (Results) is going to save you and your team a lot of time downstream. Most of what you do is not brand new stuff and so defining the way to do it, documenting it and making sure people know about it is the best way to speed it up later on. Waste time upfront to save time later.

• Enforce your processes to scale

        What if each time somebody within your organization has to do something he has to figure out by him-self how to do it. What if these people do not sit at the desk close by your own office but at a different floor, or in a different building, or in another city, or even a foreign country? How do you want to scale if there is not a modus operandi that guarantees that things are done quickly and in a consistent way across the entire organization?

Would you fly a company in which the pilot won't follow the standard comprehensive check list prior the take off and would try to do his best not to forget something critical? Processes are the highway to scale your business and your company up, and improve both productivity and quality. Don't leave it up to luck or common sense (although it is always good to get some). Write down the processes the people has to follow (wikis are perfect for that) and get it done right everywhere.

• Always try to find a better way

        Processes are supposed to support the business, not to slow it down. Processes should be written but not in stone. You should definitely keep your mind and ears open to your team's feedback. Some processes look great on a flow chart but just don't work well. Don't fight to death to make it work if there are consistent feedback that it doesn't.

Always try to improve it, to make it strong but lean, comprehensive but simple, well documented but easy to remember. Process is gold, not god, and there is no reason not to challenge it on a regular basis and ask to your team the question "But why do we do it that way? Could we do better, simpler, faster or easier?". Often the answer is "yes"... so just do it. Change the process and do it again!

• Evaluate and measure all the time

        There is only three ways to know where you stand: measure, measure and measure! Without a clear understanding of what the situation was, is and should be, you are blind. Is this process effective? Is it better than the other one? Where is the weakest link in this process, or the longest one on which you should focus your attention? Where is the most expensive step? How was the quality before and after implementing this new process? And so on...

Evaluation and measure from a cost, quantity, quality or customer and employee satisfaction stand point are the only way to improve your organization, and take the appropriate decisions to fine tune what you do to reach Excellence.

We are done. We have reviewed the three main things you have to take care of to make your team great.

It is all about people. Hire, train, empower and make accountable the best people you can afford, and get quickly rid of low performers.

It is all about results. Define and articulate a sound vision,smart objectives, clear priorities, a strong business model and write your plan down to easily share it with your team. Keep everything and everybody highly customer centric all the time.

It is all about process. Finally take the time to create and set up processes to make your organization consistent across the board, to improve its productivity, and to enable it to scale. Measure and improve your processes on a regular basis.

I would like to add that on the top of this, you have to have fun! Fun is the dressing that will make your great team standing the test of time. Fun is the bound that will help them to go through tough time. Fun is what will them all keep moving forward, day in, day out.

That's it. I hope these three posts will bring you some value. This is just a map, a highly simplified map, not  the territory that is far more complex. But having a map is a great way to know where you are and what to do to go where you want to go! So if you have additional contributions that could help us to make our team great, feel free to post a comment.