If you are a manager, sit down, swallow hard, ask yourself this question: “Do your people actually look forward to meeting with you?” Perhaps ask yourself, “Do you look forward to meeting with your manager?” Alternatively, “Do they look forward to taking you on a customer call?”
If you and your people are like 70% of the sellers I meet, the answer to this question is usually an eyeroll. Sometimes, I get a frustrated, “Well, it’s part of my job…..” or “It’s frustrating, they are always telling me what I’m doing wrong or that I need to do more…” or, more often, “It’s such a waste of time!”
Gulp!
We waste so much of our people’s time! We call meetings that are, perhaps, helpful to us, or because we think we have to have those meetings. We have endless pipeline and forecast reviews, hammering our people on the numbers, saying, “You have to do more!” We look at their activity reports, inevitably saying, “You have to do more.” We do deal reviews, focusing on, “When are we getting the deal, can you move it into this quarter?”
Even if we aren’t beating up our people, we are focused on what we need to get from the meetings, not what our people get from the meetings.
And, we think we are “coaching.”
What if we changed our approach to these meetings? What if we started to think about, “What do we and our people get from this?” What if we started thinking about how we might get our people to think differently, developing stronger skills, strategies, new approaches? What if we thought about how we and our people learn and grow out of each discussion?
We know we have to create value with our customers–in each interaction.
Yet our people are our customers. Why don’t we approach each meeting looking beyond just what we get from the meeting, but asking ourselves, “what could this individual to learn and grow as a result of this meeting? How can I help them improve as a result of this conversation.”
Here’s a radical idea, make every meeting optional! Tell the people you are inviting to the meeting, you’d love for them to attend, but only if it is the best use of their time. No harm, no foul if they choose not to attend.
If they show up, fantastic, they see some value in the meeting. If you are sitting, by yourself, in an empty room or Zoom call, that might be a clue.
This isn’t to say meetings have to be all fun and motivation. We can have very difficult conversations, we can discuss very tough issues. But if we conduct these difficult meetings in a way that each person learns and grows, people will participate. And for those few that just want fun, games, “atta-girl/boy,” in these meetings, rather than learning and growing. They may not be the right people.
And what about those customer calls?
Often, we want our people to take us on calls, they feel the opposite. We have our agenda, despite the fact they’ve been managing it, we think we can do better. And too often, we actually make it worse. Our people own the deal strategy and know more about the opportunity than we. When we are invited to accompany sellers to customer meetings, we are participating to serve them and help them advance their strategies, not the other way around!
Imagine what might happen if we created great value with our people and customers in every interaction!
Imagine if, after each interaction, people said, “This was a great use of my time!”
We and they would accomplish so much more. And I suspect, we could do this in fewer meetings!
Afterword: I’m leveraging an AI tool to discuss the points in this article. This discussion is fascinating–perhaps better than the article, itself. Take some time to listen to this, you should get some fascinating ideas.
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