Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges by Tim Sanders

Author:Tim Sanders
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-22T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Cleaning Up After the ’Storm

John Livesay built up a reputation at W magazine as a person of action, or more specifically, a flurry of postmeeting activity. Over the course of his decade-plus career in advertising sales at the company, he has organized, facilitated, and executed dozens of dealstorm meetings.

“I’m obsessed with minding the details that keep the deal moving forward,” he told me. He blocks out an hour after facilitating a meeting or conference call to gather up notes, then distills them all into an email that he immediately sends out to all participants. “It’s about making sure we are all on the same page,” he explained. “Quick and specific follow-up is essential so everyone knows what the action items are for each person and how that moves us along towards the common goal: winning.”

He spends the first post-dealstorm days verifying claims, hunting down required information, and then making plans for action. Frequently, he’ll phone dealstorm team members and ask them if they’ve had any additional thoughts or to confirm that they can or will deliver on their assignments. He gives everyone concrete time lines and then marches diligently to them “to bring the ideas from the meeting to life.”

His goal is to build, vet, and launch the solution quickly and then step back to measure deal progress and then plan next steps. “My role is a hybrid of coach and producer,” John says. “We need to make progress, but at the same time keep the team together and motivated. Because there will be more meetings or calls to come!”

John’s signature tactic is weekly reporting to the deal team, focused on the progress that’s being made. “People love structure. They want to know how the project is coming along. Closing the loop keeps the team together.”

This underscores an important point: the ideas from a dealstorm are worthless unless they are acted upon, analyzed, and improved. The quality of postmeeting follow-up is seismically more influential to the outcome than the magic that happened in the room or the enthusiasm that oozed out of it afterward. “There is no good or bad sales organization,” says Mark Schmitz, COO at SAP Cloud, “just which ones can execute the best.”

The execution step in the dealstorming process involves more than just “doing what we agreed to do.” After a good storm, there is rainfall (ideas), debris (loose ends) and blue skies (opportunity). While meetings can produce strong ideas, and many participants come well prepared, their outputs are still a work in progress.

There are three critical steps to the solid execution of a collaborative idea: (1) confirm what was decided and agreed upon; (2) verify the assumptions and claims made about key issues, such as cause and solution; and (3) implement the winning idea methodically and in such a way that allows for a test–iterate–launch approach, if possible.

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