3 Big, Impactful Ideas for Your Next Sales Conference Part I: Understand Your Who’s Who
I’m just back from freezing cold Atlanta where at one point the trees were covered with a beautiful coat of ice in bright sunshine – gorgeous! My client brought me a wonderful box of delicious marzipan-covered chocolate roses since I had traveled on Valentine’s Day. One of my favorite cities, a beautiful resort/spa and chocolate – I was in heaven!
I was there to facilitate and speak at his sales conference for the third year in a row, and each year we do some fun and funky things rather than powerpointing them to death with sales statistics. We create energy, motivation, new skills, and a desire to be the best. Each year, it’s a challenge to take the conference to a new level! This year, we created 3 great AHA! Moments for the reps and got a vote that this conference was once again, the BEST ever. Here is the first of those 3 Moments, and a resource to guide you further. I’ll share the other two in upcoming blog posts.
The first AHA! Moment: We engaged them in a workshop that helped them identify their “Who’s Who” of customer profitability:
• Which customers are their most critical to retain… and therefore key to their success
• Which customers have the most low-hanging fruit… the ones they can ramp up to help them make their sales budget more easily
• Which customers were costing the company a ton of money and needed to be restored to breakeven or better … so that the company could more easily fund new product development to help the reps be even more successful.
– The reps were surprised to find out that the unprofitable customers were generally NOT “bad” customers… instead, the issue was small, self-inflicted wounds that the reps could easily influence (like training them to submit accurate orders the first time), or self-inflicted wounds by the company (failing to update the order status, which meant the customer was constantly calling customer service or not paying on time).
Powerful Insights, Clear Direction, and Accountability: This was powerful because for the first time, the reps saw exactly where they needed to focus, what they needed to do to be more successful, and “owned” the issue of the unprofitable customers – not in a “fire the customer” way, but in a proactive, help-them-get-better way. It was a win for the customers, for the reps, and for the company!
Resource: Pick up a copy of my book, Profit In Plain Sight and read the chapter on the Customer Profitability Diamond to create your own AHA! Moment. If you’d like me to speak at your next Sales Meeting or Annual Conference, simply reach out to Speaking@AnneCGraham.com or go to Book a Keynote for more information.
Question: How do you create excitement and motivation at YOUR sales meetings?
