Use a three-part meeting structure and your sales team will make the most of every single buyer meeting!
John A. Hope at Ready Education talks to Brent about how using a three-part meeting structure helps his team better qualify prospects and move deals along more efficiently and quickly.
Too often sellers miss the opportunity to engage effectively with buyers by using a discovery meeting simply as a lead-up to a generic demo.
John explains how he coaches his team to approach each step of the three-part meeting:
👉 We focus the first part of each meeting on true value discovery and getting to the buyer’s very specific pain, and more importantly their definition of success. Too often sales discovery is superficial and not used very well to build momentum in the conversation. It ends up being a short wind up for a demo or pitch.
👉 Good value discovery sets up the right product discussion in the second part of the meeting. Rather than a generic product pitch, or demo, strong discovery makes it possible to map the product and solution to the buyer’s very specific goals.
👉 The third part of the meeting (or the “last 10 minutes”) should focus on confirming where the buyer sees the most value and the specific actions they are committed to taking to secure that value.
At Ready Education, they saw a 50% decrease in deal cycle times over a three-to-six month period, which was sustained over 12 months.
And two other things happened:
🏆 The team got a lot better at figuring which deals had the strongest likelihood of succeeding and were better qualified.
🏆 They got a lot better at building a roadmap for their buyers and working collaboratively on the steps to a closed deal.
Both of these developments helped John’s team focus their time on the deals with the highest likelihood of closing.
This intentionality at each step with your buyer enables teams to figure out which buyers are committed to moving forward with you and which are not.
Listen here!