Be Prepared.
The regular cadence of a performing sales team includes the dreaded one-on-one deal review. This meeting is usually a weekly meeting set by the Sales Manager to discuss and review the progress (or lack thereof) of the rep’s pipeline.
This experience is often a very personal experience for the rep and most reps are quick to come up with any excuse in the book to avoid or skip the weekly one-on-one.
Here are some of the most popular excuses that I’ve seen:
1. I’m out of the office on Friday.
(As if modern calendars are incapable of being revised.)
2. I have a doctor’s appointment Friday AM.
(As if the rep didn’t know about the weekly meeting and STILL scheduled the conflicting doctor appointment.)
3. I’ve been on the road all week and haven’t updated the CRM yet…
(As if the SAAS CRM system is only accessible from the office computer)
4. I have a customer demo scheduled during the scheduled one-on-one.
(This excuse is my favorite – because it neutralizes the manager in her tracks. Is she going to argue with the customer about when they are supposed to schedule the meeting? Afterall, the only thing better than a deal review (to a Sales Manager) is the sound of a rep talking to a customer.)
We all know the reality of each of the situations cited above. The reality is that the reps simply don’t want to have the one-on-one meeting with their manager because they are unprepared, disorganized, lazy, not working on the right things……and terrified that their manager is going to “finally catch-on to the ruse that the rep hasn’t made any progress since the last one-on-one meeting.”
But let us have some empathy on the rep and assume that they are on top of their pipeline….and that the real excuse is that they did not spend the one-hour required the night before of updating the CRM, strategizing on the next step for each deal, etc.
Your productive reps are actually not full of excuses but are simply overwhelmed by the volume of deals, the volume of steps and the volume of decisions and data entry required to stay on top of them all.
So what is the solution? We posit that the systems are simply “too dumb” to help the average rep. The average rep should be able to have the phone conversation with the customer, send the follow-up email and the system should be “intelligent enough” to do the updating for the rep.
With SalesDirector.ai – we do something unique with your pipeline. The truth is that your reps are busy and are juggling a lot of things at once – so what we’ve done at SalesDirector.ai is we are “looking out for your reps” – automatically.
If your reps are using SalesDirector.ai – their pipeline will be analyzed (based on YOUR mapped process) and at any given time your Sales Manager (and the rep) will know exactly what the “risk” is in the deal.
If your “required next step” for Stage 4 is to “send a proposal” – then SalesDirector.ai will watch, listen and understand when this step is taken by the rep. If the appropriate step isn’t taken SalesDirector.ai will remind the rep and will flag the deal “in yellow or red” based on the risk associated with the deal.
What this does – is it now give the Sales Manager and the Rep something very specific to talk about in their one-on-one meetings. The Sales Manager will only be inquiring about the deals in Red or Yellow……managing by exception……so that the meeting is quick, curt, focused and efficient.
As for the rep…..well, the rep can rest easy that there is no need to run from the one-on-one meetings anymore. There will be no more “one hour preparation” for the meeting – because the CRM and the deal risk is already updated by SalesDirector.ai. Instead the rep can spend that “one hour” talking to more customers, planning the next contact, spending more time with their family or sipping their favorite scotch.
The excuses are gone and the meetings are efficient – because your reps are Always Prepared.