If you want to run a successful meeting (a sales presentation), you have to be in complete control of it. From start to finish, you are leading the meeting. The moment that you lose control of it, the meeting will quickly go sideways. Your audience will lose attention. Sidebar conversations will start popping up. People will begin to play with their phones. When this happens, your meeting is over. It is difficult to regain traction too. Here are some practices on maintaining control of your meeting to help make your time with your client, and your sales presentation, a successful one.
- Have an agenda. Never run a meeting without one. The agenda must have a start and a hard stop time, the topics to be covered AND the duration for each of the topics. If you fail to list the amount of time allocated for each topic, you can easily run into the scenario where you burn up half your meeting time and you only covered the first of six topics. Not a good scenario. In addition, the attendees should be listed on the agenda. You want to know ahead of time who will be in attendance. It makes no sense to have a meeting with the wrong audience or to be missing a key person (decision maker). The agenda should always be done in advance and sent to your key contact(s) for their review and buy-in WELL AHEAD OF YOUR MEETING.
- Start on time. Do not wait for more than a few minutes for someone unless your customer specifically tells you to wait before starting the meeting. There is no need to waste the time of a room filled with people (or a conference call) while we all wait for John (unless he is a key decision-maker!). Your customer will appreciate the promptness. Their time is valuable just like yours.
- When you open your meeting, you start by sticking to the agenda. Avoid going off on a tangent or getting sucked into some side conversation that causes you to get off track as soon as you begin. This will often happen when a member of the audience asks you a “quick” question and it evolves into a bigger conversation and eats up time. Just acknowledge the question and politely let the person know that you can cover it shortly.
- As you begin to go through your topics, be managing the amount of time that you allocated to each topic on the agenda. If you had 15 minutes to cover a topic and you are now at almost 20 minutes, kindly interject by saying, “We are running a bit over our time for this topic, Would you like to continue on, or shall we mark this as a follow-up item and move on with the next topic?” When you ask this, direct the question to your key contact so a decision can be made quickly. By doing what I just wrote, you are maintaining tight control of the meeting and its flow. This is exactly what you and your customer want. Imagine otherwise. Imagine if you didn’t speak up and say anything. 25 minutes go by. 30 minutes go by. You only allocated 15 minutes and now you are wondering if you will run out of time and you didn’t even get to the really good stuff!
- During the meeting, if any questions are asked that cannot be immediately answered, write them down and recap the question to the client (to make sure you got it right). Then let the customer know that you have this question as a follow-up item and that you will get them an answer following the meeting. Then move on! Don’t waste time trying to answer something that you don’t know the answer to. You are human, you can’t know everything. Write it down and move on.
- As your meeting goes on, be making notes of what you think is being well-received and what might not have hit the mark. This will come into play later on when you wrap up the meeting. When you wrap-up, you can provide a thorough recap of everything covered and you can ask the audience how you did in each of these areas and if more work needs to be done. Your customer will appreciate the copious notes that you took. It also shows them you paid complete attention to each of their specific needs and questions by writing them down and by accurately recapping.
- If someone in the meeting asks about a topic that is not on the agenda, if it cannot be quickly answered, put the question in the parking lot and let them know that it will be covered in the next presentation, or after the meeting, you can speak with them about it. You don’t want to get derailed and sucked into a lengthy conversation with just the one person who asked the question that no one else in the room (or on the call) cares about. It wastes everyone’s time (watch how fast you will lose the audience when this happens).
- Approximately 10 to 15 minutes before the end of your meeting, remind the audience that there is only about 10 minutes left and if there is anything else that they would like to cover in the remaining time. If not, use this time to recap the meeting, the follow-up items, and to define the next steps.
- End the meeting right on time. Your customer will not only be impressed but will appreciate it. They don’t want to be behind schedule or running late for the next one. This is an annoyance and you don’t want to be the person to be blamed for it!
Practice the above. It will help you maintain solid control of your meeting/sales presentation. This is important because if you are in control, it shows the customer that your time is valuable and that you are disciplined. When you stick to the agenda and what was agreed upon for the meeting, it shows the customer that you are true to your word. This is extremely valued by someone who is considering buying from you. It also shows to the customer that if you can manage a meeting as beautifully as you just did, you can manage their business too!
Imagine if you didn’t do any of the above… you wouldn’t have any control, your meetings would run out of time, they would be all over the place, and chances are, your customer would be irritated that they didn’t get what they wanted out of the meeting. This can cost you, and most likely will cost you, their business. Practice the above and watch how well being in complete control works!
-Happy Selling!