Motivate, Educate, and then Activate

Selling success requires all three….How to attend your next sales meeting

Ever listen to a motivational speaker at the annual sales meeting and get all inspired by the message? Maybe you even bought their book right after they spoke. However, by the time you drove home from the meeting, you lost that enthusiasm.

Ever learn some great selling skills but never put them into use on your sales calls?

If you have been in sales for a while, you answered with a resounding “Yes” to both of those questions.

Why is that?

When your company hires an Olympic gold medalist to speak to your team and inspire you to never quit, why doesn’t your motivation last longer than their speech?

What about technical experts that your company brings in for training? They inform you of the latest high-tech information on your products. All in an effort to make you a better informed agronomist or nutritionist? Then, on your next sales call, you fail to bring this new information into the conversation and continue your old way of selling.

This is the classic struggle that all of us who speak, coach, and train run into. The ultimate test of our effectiveness is not how good we look or perform on stage. It’s not how cool our PowerPoint presentation slides appear. And it’s not even our resume, bio, or selling experience.

Nothing we say or do is about us!

The ultimate test of our effectiveness is how well you implement the information we provide into your sales performance. Without implementation, the motivation and education were just good-to-know.

And that’s where most one-hour keynotes or breakout sessions leave their audience. The speaker motivates or educates, but fails to tell the audience how to activate this information. They provide no starter steps to go from where the audience is to achieve what the speaker has.

I sat through some of the most inspiring personal stories from the speakers on the main stage at sales meetings, including Olympic gold medalists, war heroes, NFL legends, and Hall of Fame coaches. Only to walk away saying, “How do I implement that message into my daily life in sales? What do I do tomorrow morning when I am back in my territory, driving to my next sales call on a prospect who didn’t attend the motivational speech that I just did?”

Success stories are great, but only if you can connect them to your current situation and apply them. Only if you can set an agenda for the next steps in your selling approach in your territory.

How?

First, if you are a salesperson in one of these presentations, ask yourself:

What is the overall message of this speaker?
How does it apply to me, my team, or my marketplace?
What are some very easy first steps that I could take to implement the ideas I took from the speaker?
Now, write them down and put them on your Outlook calendar.
Find out what others on your team thought of the presentation.

Second, if you are in a position of hiring speakers, coaches, or trainers to help your sales team, then start by asking them to explain these three components of their message: motivation, education, and activation.

The questions for the speaker are:

What is the motivational message you will bring to the team?
What education topics will you provide in your presentation? And how will that apply to this team in this geography with these types of customers?
How will you customize your presentation to this audience?
What “how-to” pathway will you lay out for this team to follow to implement your message?

Third, implement a post-meeting discussion. As soon as possible after the speaker is done speaking, hold a discussion with your sales team. If not a sales leader, then try to meet with some of your peers to discuss what you heard. Then discuss how you can put the message into action.

Several discussion points to help generate ideas in this post-meeting discussion:

How would these ideas work in your sales territory?
Who would be the best customer, prospect, or customer segment to focus on first with this new approach?
Let’s plan to implement this by this date___. Then, let’s check in with each other to see how it worked. Try to make that follow-up discussion as soon as possible. The sooner you implement ideas, the more likely you are to do so.

There is a natural tendency to disregard an outside speaker. Especially by experienced salespeople. They might think this speaker doesn’t understand selling to farmers, or selling to farmers in this area. I know this is true as I was one of those salespeople.

After hearing a keynote, I would sit with my peers at happy hour and discuss how the message was fun but didn’t apply directly to what we do. My lazy way out was to not change, by simply declaring that the message doesn’t apply to me or our market.

My advice is to understand that no speaker will understand exactly what it is like to be selling your products, in your market, under your current market conditions, to your customer segment. As a member of the audience, it’s our responsibility to make that connection. We have to take that information and apply it. We are the experts of our current selling circumstances. Now, take that message, whether it’s motivational, educational, or helps you implement it. Modify it so that it fits your needs.

I’ll end with my message that I deliver to every audience. I open with this message, and then I remind them of it at the end.

“I have two responsibilities in my presentation with you today. First, I have to present information that you will remember. Secondly, I have to provide a way for you to implement that information. Without those two components, you will either forget what we discussed or you will simply not implement it into your daily sales life. More importantly, these responsibilities are also yours. You must remember and implement the information when you leave here today!”