Have you ever brought someone with you on a sales call and it turned into a train wreck?
I bet you have. Anyone in sales for longer than 10 minutes has.
It’s very common for me to hear stories about sales people bringing someone on a call with them, and it just goes sideways at some point. So, I want to talk today a bit about some best-practices on how to have better joint sales calls.
A couple common scenarios.
One could be that you want to bring your manager on a call with you, or you've requested to bring your manager with.
Another common scenario is bringing a technical person. Maybe an engineer, a product specialist, or some delivery person on the call. And then that goes south pretty quickly.
Those are two common scenarios that I will be focusing on in todays blog.
The biggest problem is in mutual mystification. That is where you think one thing should be happening on the call, the person you brought with is thinking another thing, and many times the prospect is also not even sure why you’re there.
The best practice is really having a pre-call process.
Two tools I'm attaching.
The Pre-Call Planner Tool, which is one of our strategic selling tools that really gets into mapping out the cast of characters a bit more.
And the Pre-Call Strategy Questions, for making a joint sales call. It goes through things like:
"What's your role on the call?"
"Technical person versus my role."
"If they ask a question of a technical nature, who's going to answer it?"
"What questions are they going to have for us?"
"What questions should we have for them?"
This kind of planning is key to making these joint calls work.
Most times I find that the pre-call planning is basically:
You meet someone in the lobby, the technical person meets you there, you ride up the elevator, and the ‘pre-call process’ is in the six floor elevator ride, on what you’re going do in that call?
I can't count the amount of times sales people have shared with me how it would have been a way better call if they didn't bring that person with them.
That being said, there are calls where there's a tremendous amount of value that a manager or a technical person can bring. Technical people are really good at helping scope out pain. Technical people are really good at being able to articulate solutions at the appropriate time.
Think about your process. Where can you better use the “Pre-Call Planner Tool” and the “Pre-Call Strategy Questions” to make your joint sales calls more effective?
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