Commercial efficiency
4 min reading

Successful customer meetings thanks to the practices of the top 1% of sales organizations.

Tom Le Cocguen
Published on
19/3/2024
successful customer meetings
The best salespeople are those who bring value to their customers! Don't try to sell more, rather look for the best way to help your prospects.

You need to know and understand your prospect's expectations. This is one of the reasons why it's unthinkable to arrive at a customer meeting without knowing the uses and needs of the company you're approaching. 

In this article, we provide you with step-by-step practices observed in the best companies to successfully transform a customer appointment.


1. Break down your customer meeting into 3 steps: 

Stimulate interest in your product or service through cold calling

If your prospecting method is outbound, your first step is a cold call. This step is essential! It's undoubtedly the most complicated to master, but with the right method, it's the most effective. This step should never be a presentation of your product, it's dedicated to setting up a discovery appointment. We give you our advice and methodology in this article: Cold calling: The top prospecting technique of 2021?

Set up a discovery call in advance of your demo call.

This is the most important customer appointment in your sales process. Your discovery calls will define the trajectory of your sales pitch and determine how you will conduct the rest of your process.

If your discovery call is well executed, you'll have developed a relationship of authority with your prospect.

At Modjo, the sales team always arranges a 15-minute call to understand the needs and issues of our prospects.

Benefit no. 1:

> This call will anchor the relationship and create a bond with the person. Selling is a matter of human relations and creating a relationship of trust, an intuitu personae with your prospect is paramount.

Make the effort to listen to your prospect, understand his needs and discover his problems.

On average, the Modjo user talk ratio is 38% during a customer appointment categorized as a "discovery call". This means that the sales person only talks 38% of the time during these calls.

Benefit no. 2:

> You will be able to customize the demonstration of your solution to meet the different uses of your prospect. It is useful to present all the functionalities. Unless your solution/product is for a single use only, it is unlikely that the prospect/company you have approached will be sensitive to all the features of your solution.

The best way to make a successful demo: focus on uses! Each feature you present must answer a problem.

Example: During a demo, when we present our functionality to create a library of best business practices, we focus our presentation on the issue of onboarding new employees.

Dirty questions: Are you recruiting a lot at the moment? What are your issues related to onboarding?

Prospect response: "I have a real problem with training new sales people who join the team. I'd like to speed up the training but I'm not available all day to train them on a one-to-one basis. »

During my customer appointment to present the tool, I will rely on what he was able to tell me during the discovery call. I will, of course, turn my presentation towards the functionalities that can meet his needs. This approach requires a good knowledge of the product and its various uses.

I'm well aware that some industries don't work exactly like that, but overall the structure: cold calling, discovery, demonstration, follow-up, applies more and more in non-transactional organizations.

Use all available resources to find out as much as possible about your prospect.

> Exchange of e-mails

> Upstream telephone exchanges

> Information on its LinkedIn

Find / create a link with the person. In the team, it's quite common to approach prospects who have common relationships. Playing in team spirit has a real impact on the overall performance of the team.

commercial appointment team spirit modjo

2. Our "made in Modjo" tips to validate your customer appointment:

Prove your expertise!

"You're the undisputed expert on your market."

If your contact person feels that you are indeed an expert in your field, he or she will be more confident and will be more likely to let you accompany him or her. This can make all the difference in the long run. If you have a good understanding of his problems and you provide a relevant answer, your prospect will choose your company to accompany him.

Make your prospect say what you want to say!

When you present your solution to him or her, ask for his or her opinion on how he or she might use your product.

"It's functional, what do you think it's good for?"

If the answer perfectly matches the use cases of the feature, then you've won! Be careful not to steer the answer, but to accompany it. The tricky part of this exercise lies in guiding your thoughts.

Why adopt this strategy? If your prospect understands the benefits of your service/product, objections will be that much easier to overcome.

Objection: "On the other hand, I think the tool is expensive"
Your response: "I can understand that, but when you told me about the use you could make of it and its impact on your performance, do you think it's worth it?"


Follow up on your customer appointment:

Your call is over, you have just made a next appointment to validate the sale. Be careful not to stop there! It's time to share a summary of your discussion and the points that were discussed.

Our top performers always take the time to send a note to confirm that they have fully understood the issues and benefits that Modjo will bring to their prospects. This can also raise any lingering doubts.

Why is that important?

Your contact person may not be the final decision-maker. He or she may want to discuss this with his or her team and the various stakeholders in the project.

Structuring a note-taking session will make it easier for him to share information. It is not necessarily necessary to fully detail the call. Still, provide a minimum amount of information so that the caller has all the cards in hand.

Include the link of your call in your report :

Modjo users use the call-sharing function. Thanks to the sharing functionality directly integrated into our tool, all it takes is one click for the caller to receive a link to connect to the public version of Modjo. They can then retrieve the entire exchange and share it with the other parties involved. A real time-saver for him, and an added negotiating leverage for you.

Use data to improve and succeed in your next customer meetings.

There are a multitude of subtle but undeniable buying signals that can help you identify how proactively your prospect is interested in your sales pitch.

The most convincing example is his propensity to ask questions. Whether they're about pricing, the product, next steps or the results your customers are seeing. All these questions show you that he's thinking of continuing the discussion with your company.

Other signals of interest include words or phrases that can tell you that your prospect is really excited about your product or service, such as: "Impressive", "Congratulations", "That's great", "Nice work", "That's crazy", etc.

The drawback: how do you capture these verbal buying signals? Today, technology allows us to create a whole new analysis grid via tools like Modjo. Our tool allows you, for example, to easily measure the effectiveness of your sales pitch.

Modjo is a conversational intelligence platform that analyzes your salespeople's calls to identify speeches that can make their customer appointments more efficient and relevant.

Of course, no matter how you do it, even if you just follow the data on a google sheet doc, it is essential to be able to measure the relevance of your sales pitch to be better in the next round.

At Modjo, we're convinced that a sales team that wants to progress must use data to improve its commercial efficiency.

Best,

Tom Le Cocguen
International Sales Manager
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