Episode 56: The Art to an Engaging One to One Meeting that Drives Team Performance

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management and to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered B2B sales teams. Today's an episode that in the end I actually needed to rerecord. I'm very much, very much human and happy to admit that this is an episode where I spent lots of time preparing, ran the entire episode and ended up realizing that my microphone was on mute. Nice little way to have a chuckle to start off the podcast, but I think also important that we're big and bold enough to say we don't get things right ourselves every time. Also. So next time you're thinking, wow, recording a podcast must be easy, remember back to this time, couple of hours work wasted that I've then had to redo. But on the upside, I have a beautiful new studio. Everything is set up, ready to go. We've got an old unused surfboard behind me which very much a beautiful epitomizes what I believe around life, balancing work, life and everything that comes with it. But also surfing being one of those sports where no matter how good you are, how on top of your game you are, some big wave can come from nowhere, absolutely barrel you and send you back to that level of humility to help you grow and drive forward again. Anyway, enough of the esoteric stuff. Today we are talking about one to one team meetings. Those meetings that we've all been to before with a level of apathy, but also those meetings where we've seen others come to with us with that same level of apathy. They're a very hard meeting to gain engagement from because you're often talking about things that are a little bit difficult. The stuff that people tend to put off. Those who don't like confrontation often have to deal with head on, but also take you away from the customer selling activities, which can be challenging in sales roles in particular when we are measured on our results. So what I'd like to go through today is the why, when and how of one to one meetings and how you can make them really engaging. And when I say engaging, getting them to the point that people leave these meetings fired up and ready to get into the week, the fortnight or the month ahead. Because when we can do that, we end up driving a culture where sitting down, talking through challenges, talking through opportunities, talking through what didn't quite go right becomes something that people lean into. That old saying bulls run through a storm. That's where I love to see sales teams head. And by using some really easy principles in a one to one format, we can actually make that happen at a micro level with individual team members. So we'll go through the why, when and how and I'll give you some tools that I use regularly to help me make sure that my one to one meetings are really smooth. Okay, so first up is the why. For me, this is a very easy principle. We have training and coaching options available to us as leaders. One to one meetings are one of those rare times when we get to sit down and blend in a little bit of both, but lean mostly towards coaching principles and helping our people, our individual team members, get better. So training we know training is knowledge transfer and coaching is knowledge enhancement. For me, the big why in one to one meetings is that we get to take a lot of that training material, that training knowledge, all that time we spend spent training and see how it's fitted into the day to day procedures and operations that our team members are running. When things aren't quite aligning or things aren't quite working, we get to roll in that coaching model. And I often talk about the grow coaching model. So jump Back to episode 32 of the podcast if you want to know more about the grow coaching model. But for me that's a really easy to roll out framework that we can use anywhere at any time without needing to refer to notes or any type of memory around process. It really rolls off very easily and is a terrific framework to use for our so in terms of the when, this is all about the format of the one to one meetings I'm actually going to go through today the format that I've seen used really successfully by a number of teams in their one to ones over a decade or so of my experience here. For me personally, I had a one to one format that worked really well with my team and blended holding people to account for results, which I think is really important, that we're all accountable to the results that we achieve, but also having that balance around coaching and training and motivation that are so important in a really tough role such as a sales role. So we're going to go through that briefly now. We're going to focus around strategy, talent and energy, which is all around the team step model. And they were episodes 11, 12 and 13 of the podcast. So way back in the early days last year of the podcast. And we can dive a lot deeper into those if you want to know more about them. And then last but not least is the how. So the how for the one to one meetings is all about the tools that we're using to make sure that we're actually engaging with our team members. So I'll talk a little bit about the grow model, the baseball model, and maybe even introduce or reintroduce the three box model around some great metrics that we use to measure our teams. But before we do that, we've spoken a bit about the why. Let's get into the when and the format. So the what if you like of the one to one meeting and how. I've seen teams work them really well. So my favorite format for one to one templates are nice and easy and simple. Typically we'll see teams use six to eight template slides for example. PowerPoint's a really popular format that I love encouraging my teams to use because it's so user friendly. And salespeople, typically they're not admin driven people. They're people that like to be out communicating, closing deals, finding great customer outcomes, or doing everything else but sitting behind a computer. So when we can build a template out that is repeatable, really easy to understand and the team buy into, then straight away we're moving away from that sense of somewhat apathy or that apathetic approach to one to ones and starting to build some engagement already. So generally we'll use a template that has those six or seven slides and all of the data that we put in or the vast majority of the data that comes in comes straight out of a CRM. So if you have someone helping you, a sales coordinator or even an EA if you're so fortunate as a sales leader, these people can play a really good role in pre filling one to one templates before the event. And if you can't by having the information directly downloadable from our CRM systems, it means our sales team members don't need to spend lots of time preparing for those harder metrics that we're measuring the strategy and the personal growth stuff that I talk about later on. Well, that's up to them to be providing some great updates. But again, by using that really consistent format, everyone comes into the one to one meetings ready to go, understanding what's ahead of them and engaged in that process. So we're lining up for our one to one. We are fortnightly, weekly, monthly, doesn't matter when they are. But by having that consistent format, everyone's coming in and ready to go. The first thing that I see great teams work around and great leaders really embody is asking the question about how are you? Pretty straightforward, but so many one to ones. I see people jump straight into the hard quantifiable metrics and forget that softer side that is so important. So why is the question how are you actually that important? Couple of reasons. Number one, it's about building your relationships and keeping your relationships showing genuine care is absolutely critical. As a leader. I think most leaders I work with sign up to that pretty easily. But the unintended consequence of that question is that we get to understand what's going on behind the scenes. So behind the facade of our sales people who are paid to be very good at influencing and building relationships, which means they're often putting on a Persona that may not be reflective of what's really happening in their lives. But by asking that question, we get to see if there's anything getting in the way of them doing their job well. It might be turbulence at home, it might be health issues, it might be relationship issues at work or departments they're having trouble with, or anything that is likely to come up as more softer stuff outside of being able to bring in deals or manage customers or execute our promises. So by asking that question, we can then tailor how we're running our one to ones according to the answer. For example, if we have a team member that comes in and their first response to that question is do you know what? I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed straight away. Jumping into hard metrics probably isn't the best place to start in the one to one. So we might skip ahead and focus around their learning journey or some of their strategic items, or even some time management skills that they can be working on to help them really get on top of that workload. At the same time, if we have a sales team member that comes in and says I'm flying, everything's going really well, sales are strong, I'm loving it, that might then lead us to spend a bit more time around their pipeline to have a look if sales being so strong, to make sure that we're still investing time in building that pipeline or the early stage lead indicators of what's likely to happen in the future months. And in that instance, because our salespeople are so confident with everything that's going on from a results point of view, we can help them avoid missing out on any triggers that might lead to some lower sales numbers in the future. So asking the question, how are you? Very, very important. Typically what I'll then do is jump straight into sales results and generally we'll do that by a reporting period. Monthly is very common. Quarterly, we'll do a year to date, we'll tailor it against the budget and then actually track those results as to how they're going. This is just a really nice way to start because at the end of the day we are measured on results and by getting to this straight away, we don't have anyone worrying about what's coming around. Numbers we know we can hit it straight on like bulls running through the storm and then can address where we're going really well or where any issues that we have. It's also really nice to be able to look at it over an extended period of time. I actually put months and months or reporting periods down a page or down a PowerPoint slide because then we can actually see whether or not we're having one off issues or there's some systemic problems or in fact, if we're actually overachieving consistently and need to look at ways we can challenge our people even more. So for me, starting with those numbers straight out of the CRM off an Excel document that can just auto populate and we're away talking about numbers. That's very much about the strategy side of team leadership. So we've spoken about the TeamSTEPP model a number of times over this podcast. Strategy, talent and energy leading to peak performance. And I mentioned before, episodes 11, 12 and 13 really cover this off. But for me, we start here on this strategic piece that talks about how well our team is actually converting their sales numbers. Next we'll move into the talent part of our one to one, which is all around how we're building a pipeline. Again, generally this is a reasonably hard metric that comes straight out of our pipeline. We we'll have things like our pipeline target, our actual pipeline size, so the dollars we have of our pipeline versus our pipeline target. We'll then look at the number of new quotes or proposals or engagements that we've made versus the target that we have in the team and sometimes we'll throw conversion rates into this. So this is very much about the future state of sales. Our first stage is to look at our current state of sales, what we're actually achieving. But what we're talking about now is our future state. So what's coming down the pipeline? What's our pipeline target? What have we got in our pipeline versus that target, and then how many quotes are in that pipeline versus our target? The reason why I look at both of these is because we want to make sure that if we have a $1,000,000 pipeline target and we have a million dollars or $1,050,000 of actual pipeline in there, we actually then want to have a look at the number of projects that are contributing to this. So for example, if we would have liked to have seen 50 deals, 50 $20,000 deals make up that million dollar pipeline, but we've actually only got 10, that would immediately indicate to me that we've probably got those bigger, longer term deals that are going to take a little bit of time to close. So we might have a short term issue around pulling sales through into the business. At the same time, if we have a pipeline that's a little bit short, but we have lots and lots of deals that are at the desired state, then we can focus on perhaps putting in a few slightly larger deals that will help over the long run, bring some peaks into our sales numbers and really drive us to that next level of sales achievement. Then by looking at conversion rate, we're just making sure that as a team, we are providing the proper amount of strategic planning and execution to our customer proposals and our customer quotes to make sure they're closing. We want to make sure that we're not doing all that hard work to get a customer proposal and quote and understand their needs and not close them out. And when that number's down or up, we can certainly pivot our thinking in the one to one around that. Okay, so we've looked at the strategic side and the talent side of our team's performance. But to dive a little bit further into the talent side of performance, actually like to focus around the top deals or top projects or top accounts that our salespeople are working on. And generally we'll limit these to the 10 to 20 top customers or projects or deals or whatever they are maybe that they're working on. And we look a little bit deeper into what's going on with these. For me, I really love this part of a one to one because you actually start to get real, you Start to talk with your team member, you start to look through what's happening at a slightly deeper level without needing to jump down into the whole portfolio of our team, but at the same time showing that we care, being able to add some input and also directing our team members as to where they might be able to get some help to close out those deals. This actually works really well with the deal review meetings that I've spoken about previously. One of the four team meetings that I see is driving highly engaged teams and you can actually pick up that resource at stronger sales teams and you'll see there's lots of resources in there and there's one specifically around sales team engagement, which talks a lot around deal reviews. So once we've had a chance to look through our customers and projects that our team members are working on, we're actually taking that deeper dive into the pipeline to make sure that our team members don't need any help closing out deals to make sure that they're spending the right time with the right customers to give us the best chance to be able to work with them down the track. So from there, the last stage I like to look at, at a really hard metric is how our team members are going around generating new prospects, new leads. Doesn't matter how you look at it, but how our sales team members are actually looking at those future seasons of the business. So it's certainly not the short term, it may be the medium term, definitely into the long term to be bringing in that new business and that very much top of funnel type of behavior that allows them to have some confidence to spend time on their existing customer base and their existing proposal base, knowing that there's more work coming through. So this is very much the energy side of the TeamStepp model and it's all about making sure that our team members are working hard when it comes to getting out and seeing customers. I tend to not delineate too much between marketing and sales generated leads other than looking at leads, target number of marketing generated and number of sales generated. From here, what I see come out quite often is that we will have a team member that's focused really heavily on a strong pipeline and closing out the deals, but not spending much time on generating new leads. So we often see these numbers drop or we'll see a team member that's generally a little bit earlier in their time with the business, or someone that's come off a really successful period of closing and building business that will start to spend a fair bit of time and in really Generating these new leads. For me, making sure our team has some confidence in their own lead generation strategy. Because I'm a huge believer that sales team members who can generate their own business are never out of work. So understanding what their strategy is and how we can help them goes a long way to building confidence around how they deal with their pipeline and close out deals. Certainly something I get asked all the time around here is how do I encourage my team to be generating leads themselves and cold calling and outbound lead generation. And for me the answer is always the same and that's outbound calls are not the only ways to generate leads. Certainly not my preference. And I know a lot of other people who don't have this as their preference in terms of generating leads. However, it is one of eight to 10, if not more really common ways to be generating leads. Such as networking, such as using their own previous customers, such as aiming for referrals, such as trying to bring old customers back into the business, trying to increase basket sizes of current businesses, even some little guerrilla marketing or guerril generation tactics that I love seeing successful sales teams use. So by focusing on this part of their business or of their day to day operations, it really helps me build some confidence that lead generation is possible for team members and you don't need to worry about marketing bringing them forward. Never does a week go past when I don't have a conversation with a sales team member talking about the low quality of marketing team leads. So when we can build this skill and particularly measure it, I find that team members actually get better at managing their existing pipeline and closing out their deals. So those four slides are very much about measuring some hard numbers within our teams, plus a little bit of coaching around our actual customers that we have running from here. What I'd love to move through to with our teams is to start to talk around their key accounts. And if it's not a key account, it might be a key partner, it might be a lead generation referral program. Anything that the team members are working on that require them to repeatedly exercise the same behaviors with customers. Now if you have a team that's very much focused on hunting, they win a customer and move on to something else, then we might look at something else here. We might look at call scripting, we might look in a little bit more detail about some of their sales process. But certainly for a lot of teams that I've been working with over the last few years, key account management or partner management has become very important. So this part of the one to One again, one slide, same format. So team members know how to bring the information. Each time just talks about the care count, their actual results versus their budget results, but most importantly what their next steps are, what they need to be doing to be progressing them towards their goals, where they need help, and how you as their leader can help reduce any potential roadblocks or barriers that they might need to get through. I love this part of a one to one after the hard metrics because it allows you to be just that little bit more creative. It allows us to talk through solutions and problems very much like we did with our customer deals a few moments ago, but at a bigger, broader scale. And certainly something that I see leaders benefit from by being able to actually roll out across multiple team members, but more at a micro level. So having run through those slides that are very much customer focused, those first four or five slides all about customers performance, sales metrics and how the team are performing at this point in time. And it's generally the second half of the one to ones. I like to really focus on the strategic action items that team members should have. So these are things that have come about outside of their sales role and are about improving the business's offer. They're about making sure that they're often tasks that have come from the strategic planning workshops that teams run together. Side note, the best teams I've ever worked with actually bring their salespeople into their strategic planning. They may not decide or they may not define the entire Runway, but they're certainly helping work out what pots of gold need to be picked up along that journey. But often we'll have BDMs that are or salespeople or account execs or territory managers. It doesn't matter who you are that have been allocated some specific tasks over and above their day to day sales activities. I love this from a learning point of view for team members, but also a motivational state point of view. Because for me, if you can have your team spending 10 to 20% of their time outside of direct selling, it is not only increasing their competence, but it's also helping keep them really engaged. And rarely do I come across a team that is working at 100% sales capacity and can't take on anything else. So for me this is a terrific time to slow down, really talk about progress on some of these items and as a sales leader learn, you get to learn exactly what's happening out in the field over and above the direct customer interactions so that we can continuously be improving that offer. Because as soon as we stop in most industries we tend to fall behind. So once we spend a bit of time around those strategic items, I then really like to focus on the personal learning journey. So this is all about the post performance review learning objectives that we often set for our team members. Saying it's something as simple as doing an Excel course, which I think is quite mundane, through to shadowing other departments, through to gaining some leadership skills, through to learning how to run training programs or coaching models or even some really specialized focus items that we might have. For example, closing, improving their skills around closing. And by ending the meeting, focusing on where our team members can learn and grow, I find that they actually leave the meeting very engaged because without doubt there's a sense of I'm important too that comes from these meetings which then falls into greater commitment into their work. So if I was to sum up how a great one to one format works. So this is the what as we spoke about in terms of our one to one meetings, it's very much about starting with understanding exactly how one of your team members are make sure there's nothing in the way and then pivot if there is, then moving into some metric review, which is about what are your results, how are you building a pipeline to make sure our future results continue to grow. And that often includes some deeper dives into customers. And thirdly, we're then looking at the amount of energy that's going into generating new leads, new prospects, new customers and that real future state of business. And last but not least, we then take a bit of a pivot into looking at some of our key accounts or our more longer term business in detail. The last two things really popular and for me really work in driving a great motivational state from our team members is we look at the strategic action items or outside of direct sales activities that team members are spending time on. And last but not least, and I love leaving it to last, is all about learning. So what are they doing to improve as individuals so that we can help them be the very best versions of themselves now and into the future? Okay, so in terms of some tools that can help you as a leader really get the most out of one to. First of all, there's a couple of tips that I think are really important and really evident in teams that I see when running their one to ones. Number one is they're very consistent so the times don't move around. They use the same format and the team members know exactly what's going to happen in those one to ones so they come in with a very level state. Number two is they tend to focus on what's important first, and that's within those categories and subcategories that I spoke about. But they get to the really big golf balls early in the one to one and don't build into them so that it becomes a distraction as to wow, when are we gonna get there? When are we gonna get to this really important point? And last but not least is they use a really good coaching framework. So the grow model is one I've spoken about and that's episode 32 if you wanna see a little bit more from the Stronger Sales Team podcast. So in terms of tools, there's three things that I have for you to think about today. The first one, and one of my favorites, is all about the baseball model. And this is a model that I actually learned from someone that I spent a lot of time with as a business partner over the last 20 years. But a model that can be used really well in both dealing with conflict, but also in understanding needs of customers. So rather than going out to look for it online, I have a great resource. Please DM me. I'm more than happy to share it with you if you'd like to know more about it. That's number one. Number two, metric measurement. I work a lot off a model I call the three box model and I keep putting it out there. Anyone who's got a better name for it, please let me know and I'm more than happy to change it. But that was episode 15 in the strongest Sales Team podcast and that talks a lot around those three pillars of strategy, talent and energy. And it's also a really nice way to very simply measure a team. It doesn't discount having more metrics that come off those, but what it does is it focuses the team's attention at the very top line, most important metrics without causing confusion and overwhelming metrics. Any dashboard I use only has those three metrics and for me they work really well at keeping sales teams focused on. And last but not least is using the one to one team meetings as part of a broader four meeting strategy with your teams. So that's your weekly sales team meeting paired with a weekly or fortnightly training program. They're very much that team focus and then added to a deal review or an account review session. One that I've spoken about quite a few times across the podcast, but very much focuses on customers and specific projects and uses the collective horsepower of the broader team. DM me, if you'd like to know more about that, but also the one to one meetings. So by having these four meetings all paired together, they actually work really well at layering in progress, motivation and for me, most of all results coming from our team. So if you'd like to know a bit more about how we engage teams across those four meetings, have a look at the podcast episode 24 or on strongersalesteam.com resources and it's under Sales Team Meeting design and you'll see an opportunity there to download something that can help you you. So that's a pretty chunky episode. We've spoken about the why, the when or the what and the how we go about one to ones why, being all around the importance of training and coaching and consistency with our teams, knowing we're there to support them, the what or the how all about the format, asking our team members how they are and then having a really consistent approach that's easy for our teams to follow. And the last one being the how is a couple of tools that we can use within our one to ones to make sure that we're getting the most out of them. And I think the baseball model and the grow model is the most important there. So and please spend some time to look up those So I hope that what's come out of today is you've taken one or two tips around how you run your one to ones. Most teams I work with have one to ones in some form, but I've never sat with a team who didn't take something out of that strategy because it's really impactful and is one that's been brought together across decades of experience and thousands and thousands or tens of thousands of one to ones. So for today's health and fitness tip, and I've spoken about this a little bit before, but I think it's one that's really worth bringing up again. It's become quite topical over the last few weeks with a lot of leaders and sales teams that I'm working with and that's treating your exercise and your physical wellbeing like a scheduled event in your calendar. It's something I do. I have time blocked out in my calendar every single day of the week. That allows me to focus on what I need to keep myself running. Well, most of the times that's exercise. I know on most mornings I'm exercising between 5:30 and 7, but I also at times go at lunchtimes or I'll go after work or when my schedule doesn't allow for me to go at exactly when I want to, I'll make sure I'll pick the other time. But what I do do is that when something conflicts with my normal exercise time, I will find time in my day to free it up. And absolutely, overwhelmingly am I seeing an increase from executive level leaders who are encouraging their team members to be fit and healthy. So when you're allocating time in your calendars to do so, that's absolutely lining up with those values around looking after yourself. I'm a big believer if you'd like to drive a fit and healthy team, you need to be fit and healthy yourself. So by setting that example, as long as you're doing your role and everything you need to do within, it is a really powerful way to not only keep yourself fit and healthy, but show others how they can follow. So that's it for today. Another chunky episode. Lots of really powerful ideas in there. If you want more information, you can download the transcript from stronger Sales Teams. Also you can find us on LinkedIn. It's really easy to find me. I get back to everyone who messages me via LinkedIn, so if you have something that you'd like to talk about, please DM me. Otherwise, until we get together again next week, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're ongerngersalesteams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.