Any meeting with a customer executive demands aligning with the executive’s business priorities, having meaningful ROI numbers at hand, and more.  However, you also need to be able to nimbly navigate the twists and turns that can unexpectedly arise during your face-to-face conversation. To be ready for conversational pitfalls that take you off message, add role playing to your preparation.

If you’re not comfortable with role playing, get over it. It’s the best way to simulate the scenarios that can derail any well-rehearsed presentation and foresee how to effectively respond when the dialogue digresses.

Remember that this is the executive’s meeting, not yours. This person sets the agenda and can route the conversation in any direction.

For role playing, enlist a colleague or manager to play an executive and imitate that individual’s personality. Work your script against your co-worker’s portrayal of the hurried executive, or the skeptical executive, or the executive who recently had a poor experience with another sales professional.

By practicing your delivery in these less-than-ideal situations, you develop the ability to deviate from your plan yet still have a successful businessperson-to-businessperson dialogue.

If possible, have a third person observe the action. Ask your colleagues to rate you on how well you are able to cover the basics of any executive-level engagement. These include your ability to:

• Cite external factors to establish your credibility
• Link customer business initiatives to your proposed solution
• Demonstrate business impacts using meaningful metrics
• Articulate the business change you’re envisioning in parlance of the executive
• Engage the executive to validate opportunities
• Close the meeting with a call for executive sponsorship

More Meeting Tips

There are a few other key things you should keep in mind and have your role-playing cohorts watch for during these practice sessions as well:

• Get to the point. Don’t expect to have more than two minutes to engage the executive and deliver your value proposition. Make it succinct and understandable. You need to set both the scope and expectation right away.
• Listen more than talk. Once the stage is set, pay particular attention to who is doing most of the talking. After your value proposition is on the table, the ratio of dialogue should be 80 percent executive and 20 percent you. If this ratio gets reversed, it means you have not engaged the executive. Recheck your messaging and try again.
• Don’t run from tough questions. Be prepared for "show stopper" questions – questions you are not prepared for. Practice handling these, and clearly communicating that you will get back to the executive with answers. Ducking tough questions will reflect poorly on your trustworthiness and integrity.
• Focus on the pain point. Keep the discussion focused on the business problem the executive needs to solve, and resist the temptation to focus on your solution. Again, this meeting is about the executive and the executive’s issues, not about you and your quota. If your meeting is a success, you will gain sponsorship and your solution’s value can then be fully developed and quantified.
• Look for other sales opportunities. If an executive is not interested in your solution and insists on talking about other problems, don’t resist. Give up on your script and pay attention. This is a great time to practice your listening and questioning skills. The outcome may result in an even better sales opportunity than you expected.

Finally, pay attention to the overall tone and content of your message. This meeting should be all about the executive, not about you. A practice partner who is overly critical on this point will help you greatly.

Give a try and let us know the results!

By Scott Karren, CEO Channel Ventures and Executive Conversation Consulting Executive

Social networks are all the rage right now. If you are not talking about ‘friends’ and ‘community’ you are SO 2009. With all of the smoke, it is hard to even get a glimpse at the mirrors.

I was recently engaged to facilitate a small channel community. Since the group met face-to-face only a couple times a year, we used web forums, teleconferences, and one-on-one phone calls to facilitate interaction. Because the group was hand picked by the vendor and all members had significant common interests, we were surprised at how hard the process was. Some community building principles have come to light through this process.

First

The facilitation team must have a member who is obsessed by the topic and issues. The team must have an individual who is not only super smart and experienced, but also endowed with boundless enthusiasm; someone who wakes up at two in the morning with valuable insights that must be communicated. This person can be a customer, an employee, an analyst or even a consultant, but has to have an unstoppable obsession for the group and for the topic.

Second

Communications within the group must be open and interesting. Conversations cannot be overtly censored or even covertly managed. If members get the sense that they cannot speak openly, they go mute. Although communication should be respectful, the objective is not to restate the party line or reiterate the program benefits. It is simply to explore, refine and document critical issues and their solutions. Because the issues are important, expect (even encourage) disagreement and strong feelings.

Third

Groups must have true leadership. People want to know their contributions are significant and that they make a difference. Communities can suffer from two kinds of failures: 1) lack of direction; and 2) lack of motivation. One is like being lost and the other is like being in a storm. Leadership is the ability to deliver both of these issues at the right times.

Without clear objectives, the individuals that make up a company, channel or community question whether or not they are in the right place. Loss of faith in a channel takes a long time to dissolve a community, but if it gets momentum, it is often fatal.

More sudden and more violent are the outbreaks of frustration that are manifest when community members feel disenfranchised or ignored. While they may still believe in the strategy and vision, they stop contributing positively because they are unrecognized. While most employers understand the need for providing recognition for employee contributions, channel managers often take the morale of their channel for granted.

‘Community’ is hot. We see it discussed in all of the news magazines. Yet even with all of the new community building tools (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn), true communities are still hard to create and grow. Without enthusiasm, candor and leadership they will never produce the returns both vendors and partners desire.

Have you ever walked out of an executive’s office after a critical sales call – and immediately started kicking yourself about what you should have said, what you should have known?

Of course you have. And you’re not alone.

The trick is to use that hindsight to your advantage. After every executive engagement – successful or not – make it a practice to self-assess, self-coach and improve. It’s like the game tapes athletes watch after every win or loss. The idea is to study what you did right, what you did wrong – and how you can learn from both to improve performance next time.

Athletes obviously have coaches to help them improve. Maybe you’re lucky enough to have a sales manager with the time and ability to coach you – to actually go out on sales calls with you to observe and provide feedback on your performance.

But I’m guessing you often don’t. Given today’s hectic schedules, sales managers tend to be consumed by the demands of closing deals and hitting sales targets, leaving little time for one-on-one coaching.

Develop a Self-Coaching Regimen

For truly motivated sales professionals, the ticket to improving performance lies within. More to the point: If you don’t figure out what you need to do better yourself, nobody is going to figure it out for you.

To be sure, what you have in your head – and what you actually say when you’re face to face with a customer executive – are often two different things.

An ideal practice to develop for anyone who sincerely wants to build credible engagement skills with executives is to create a Scorecard and fill it out immediately after key in-person meetings or telephone calls. You’ve got to be completely honest. You’ve also got to do it while the details are fresh; the exercise will be less effective if you even wait a day.

And save this regimen for calls with truly senior-level executives, otherwise the routine won’t stick.

The best approach is to memorize the Scorecard questions. This will help you build your skills and confidence as you prepare for your calls. Below are recommended questions for on your Scorecard, but you may decide to add some of your own. Over time you may want to narrow the focus of your Scorecard to those areas needing most improvement or posing the greatest personal challenge.

Bottom line, the Scorecard concept doesn’t need to be rigid, but it should be a regimen you follow faithfully.

Call a Time-Out

Although you have many demands on your time, for this Scorecard regimen to work, you must stop the action immediately after your executive engagement. You’re going to have to pause from the press of daily tasks to be reflective. What did I do well in that meeting? What could I have done differently? Did I successfully secure sponsorship to re-engage with the executive? Do I need a refresher course to improve my executive focused selling skills?

And if you manage others or collaborate with team members on accounts, encourage them to participate with you. Hindsight multiplied can be a wonderful thing.

Use or adapt the Scorecard below to get started. Answer each of the following with True, Mostly True or Needs Improvement after every senior level engagement.

Self-Coaching Scorecard

• I successfully validated my customer’s top business initiatives.
• I effectively aligned my solution’s value with those business initiative(s).
• I credibly demonstrated my solution’s value using business performance metrics meaningful to the executive with whom I met.
• I clearly articulated the enabling solution I envisioned from the perspective of how it will positively change my customer’s business.
• I asked questions that effectively established my credibility and discovered new opportunities.
• I had carefully considered the implications of my customer’s corporate structure and budget cycle in the decision process.
• I scheduled time to role-play the engagement with my manager in advance and to debrief afterward.

Develop a New Game Plan

If you take the time to honestly analyze the details of your engagements and complete a Scorecard each and every time, you’ll start to see patterns. For example: When you went in and tried Approach X three different times, it was totally ineffective each time. But on the occasions you tried Strategy Y, it really sparked some good dialogue and got things moving.

Once you start recognizing patterns and associating them with success or failure, you have exactly what you need to develop a winning game plan. And since you’re both player and coach, the ball is in your hands.

What techniques have proven useful in your experience?

As a sales professional, it’s natural that closing the deal is foremost in your mind. However, our experience shows that focusing on winning during an executive engagement actually undercuts your prospects for success.

Winning a strategic sale requires many interactions. Concentrating on success in advance distracts you from what you want — performance in the present.

When you focus on closing the deal, your natural inclination is to talk. You want to make sure the customer executive appreciates your solution’s full range of value. But instead, the customer may sense your anxiety, especially if the conversation doesn’t go as expected. They may wonder if you really understand what they need.

Learn new skills

Listening starts long before the first meeting, when you begin teaching yourself about the customer. Due diligence ahead of time enables you to address their needs and ask questions that will command their interest.

On the sales call, be sure to:

• Listen to their answers. Follow this maxim:

"We were born with two ears and one mouth, so we can listen twice as much as we speak." This advice dates back nearly 2000 years to the ancient Greek philosopher, Epictetus. It’s simple advice but hard to follow.

• Practice active listening. Active listening means you respond to the speaker. If you don’t have this skill, practice it every day.

Experts say it takes about 21 days of disciplined practice to learn a new skill. Phrase responses to a prospect’s statements in the form of another question. This helps clarify your understanding, solicit more information, and advance the purchase decision.

Pursue excellence over perfection

When we focus solely on closing the deal, we’re drawn into hopeless perfectionism. A good example of the perfectionist at work is Howard Hughes, the aviation pioneer who fell short of his potential.

His biographers wrote: "Hughes never learned how to convert his knowledge to practical application. Instead he sought a perfection that assured failure."

By seeking excellence rather than perfection, you can accept and learn from your mistakes. And you have less cause to feel discouraged and disappointed. This change in attitude and practice will result in a higher percentage of closed deals.

Follow these 4 tips to perform in the moment

1. Early in the sales cycle, validate your customer’s initiatives. Show that you both understand these drivers and see how they fit into the customer’s strategic plan.
2. Mid-cycle, secure agreement on the alignment between your customer’s business and your solutions. Extend this focus beyond the deal, to the formation of a partnership between your organizations.
3. As the deal nears closing, quantify its advantages. Underscore the return on investment, and relate it to your customer’s investment criteria.
4. Throughout your meetings, emphasize process and performance goals. When you come to a meeting, know the steps it must achieve to lead to the next stage. Make that the business of the meeting.

You’ve done it: You finally managed to get an hour of time with a customer executive you pursued for months. Now, a top executive from your company wants to join you on the call.

Bringing a top executive along could be a good thing, as it might show your potential customer how important they are to you and your company.  But if that person dominates the meeting talking about your market-leading products, it could derail your efforts.

Here’s how to put this scenario to work for you, and keep your efforts on track.

Prepping Your Executive

If you’re going to be successful, you have to build rapport with your customer’s executive sponsor by aligning your value with their initiatives. First, make sure your executive is aware of their prioritized initiatives.

Whether your executive has quality time or just the quick car ride over to prepare for the meeting, provide him/her with these three resources:

• Recent management presentations to the investment community
• The last two quarterly earnings press releases
• The “Letter to Shareholders” from their most recent annual report

Prepping Yourself

Your executive isn’t the only one who needs to do homework! Steer the conversation to show how both organizations will benefit from working together. And plan your sales strategy well before the meeting.

Your homework involves detecting significant changes or trends in your customer’s financial statements and spotlighting areas where you can provide the most value. Be prepared to identify:

• The top 3-5 external factors affecting the company’s business model
• Key business initiatives prioritized by your ability to impact them
• Solutions you can offer to address those initiative
• Business metrics that will measure the success of your solution
• References where you’ve done it before

Share your research and objectives with your boss, so that you can work together to demonstrate your company’s value.

At the Meeting

• Formally introduce everyone. If your boss isn’t well known to the customer, make sure you’ve taken time to research things he and your executive sponsor have in common. Are they from the same town? Do they have similar interests? As you introduce your executive, highlight common interests to build rapport.
• State the purpose of the meeting

Have you ever attended an important sales meeting with one of your executives in tow? Comment below and let us know about your experience.

Of all the questions we receive from the sales teams we work with, one of most common involves when and how to use references. Sometimes, one question incites a number of different perspectives.

In this post, our Consulting Executives share three different viewpoints on how to use references when responding to RFP’s and RFI’s.

The Situation
You need to respond to and RFP or RFP and you’re asked to provide references. At this early stage, should you identify your coveted reference accounts or respond with a general statement such as:

“To respect and protect the confidentiality of our customers, we’ve found that providing references too early in the process puts the burden of education about our technical and functional capabilities on you rather than on us.

Going through the process of joint discovery, solution design, and product demonstrations prior to providing detailed reference information allows both our customers and our prospective business partners to have a more focused and meaningful conversation.

We bring over 15 years of expertise and currently support customers in 88 countries. As business partners, you can be confident we will extend the same courtesy to your organization.”

Our Executive Perspective

Answer 1: “I’m Alarmed By This Response”

I would be quite alarmed if someone gave me this lawyerly answer to a references request. I would start to wonder what they were hiding, especially if I were planning to invest a significant amount on the solution or if the solution were important. Since I am an executive, I would assume it meets both those criteria since they are talking to me.

What is the customer looking for in the question? Experience of the sales person, capability of the integration and support teams? Credibility of the company or product? Business case justification and likely ROI? Involvement with competitors?

Any company of any size should have some vetted references by product type and vertical industry that demonstrate the solution, the business case and the experience and credibility of the company. You can demonstrate your knowledge by selecting the right references and using them to guide and further the conversation with true, specific real world answers.

Answer 2: “I Don’t See a Problem”

First let me say that I am a big believer in the value of reference accounts, but I don’t have a problem with a general statement approach. For reference accounts to work well, considerable set-up behind the scenes is necessary, and an out-of-control process leads to problems that may never become visible.

It is possible that you could lose a deal before getting out of the starting blocks, but a serious effort to get the best solution would accept this approach and rationale at such an early stage in the deal. In my mind, you run about the same risk with an uncontrolled, poorly matched “reference checking” approach.

Although the general statement is already lengthy, you might also consider adding the notion that you also want to match references to the specific nature of the project at hand, and thus need to get more involved before the best reference accounts are identifiable.

Answer 3: “Craft a Balanced Response”

The key to effectively addressing this situation is to balance your response. On one hand, you need to protect your existing customer’s confidentiality, but at the same time, responding with a just a general statement may turn off some customers.

Consider variations of how to reference. For example, documented collateral that is anonymous and yet vertically focused testimony, whereupon the name/identify of the reference is revealed at a certain phase of the process or signed testimonials with customer name and company. The other very viable option today is a video of the individual giving testimony with responses to FAQs. They can always explain that it is the customer who is making choices of varying degrees and they will reveal what they can at different phases.

Which of these techniques do you agree with and why? Comment below if you have any tips you’d like to share!