Annual Sales Meeting

I've led a lot of annual sales meetings, and I've participated in even more. The good ones provide a forum for sales and marketing leaders and contributors to work through tough go-to-market issues.

As Geoffrey James (The Sales Machine) pointed out in a recent post, one of the key goals for a productive sales meeting is "issue resolution". I would go a step further and make sure that the issues impacting performance be made part of the agenda, and that everyone involved knows their role and responsibility.

One of the challenges my clients want to overcome is how to get sales and marketing to articulate consistent and compelling messaging across the buyer profile universe. As organizations grow and more employees are added, communications become haphazard. Everyone creates their own version of the value proposition and the solution positioning, confusing the prospectin and impacting forward progress.

Getting everyone on the same page means defining what that "page" is going to be. That's the concept behind my "B2B Messaging Boot Camp", an intensive 1-2 day workshop for sales and marketing managers.

Participants will create a messaging playbook that defines where their company and its offerings sit in the marketplace, and then map these messages directly at the targeted buyer profile.

It's a lot of work. I just led a team of managers at a software technology company through the process, and it requires a total commitment in order to meet the objective. But the result is that everyone in the organization is talking the same talk, and it happens to be the right talk.

If you're interested in the B2B Messaging Boot Camp, you'll find all the info you need here plus a short video.