The right sales meeting prep can dramatically increase your deal velocity. And, the good news? You can do it in about 15 minutes.

That is why skill #4 in our Sales 3.0 Series is building your skills for a quick, targeted prep session before each sales call to make sure you are ready to personalize the conversation.

Sales meetings are hard to get — which makes it surprising that so many sales team members show up and “wing” their meetings with little preparation.   

When I ask why, this is what I hear: “There are so many things I could prepare, I don’t know what to focus on.” Or, “Before I know what the buyer cares about, it seems like time off task.”

But, here is the thing, the best sales meetings are run consistently in three parts:

• Value discovery — they start by identifying and reconfirming what your buyer values
• Value personalization — they continue to focus on that specific value and sharing peer stories
• Next commitments — they end with securing buyer actions that build readiness to purchase

It only takes 15 minutes to prep all three phases of a sales meeting, and it allows you to always add value and personalize the conversation. Here’s how:

–> Prepping value discovery

• For a first meeting, review the company’s website and LinkedIn posts for the individuals participating in the call. Use the review to offer one or two “hypotheses” on current goals. 
• In a second or third call, always include a slide on “what you have learned to date” to set up the next level of discovery with earlier call participants and new call participants.  

–>  Prepping value personalization

• For a first, second, or third meeting, identify your one or two most similar peer customer stories.  There is nothing that will get a buyer to engage quicker than evidence of success with a peer.  
• If no direct peer exists, suggest a piece of content — story, blog, eBook — that can help a buyer deepen their knowledge about a specific goal.

–>  Prepping next commitments

• Finally, go into every meeting with an idea of who you will want to have join the next meeting. You can find those individuals on LinkedIn or websites.  At the end of a meeting, ask your buyer who they would like to join the next meeting.  If they do not know, say something like, “we usually invite <researched buyer name’s> role, would you be open to having them join?”

Let’s say you are fortunate enough to get 5 high-quality sales meetings a week. You would need to spend 75 minutes to prepare for meetings in this way. That is about 2.5% of your work week.

It’s a modest time commitment, and you will get much better meeting results.