When you think about prepping for a sales call or sales meeting, what’s on your checklist? Research the company? Add the person or persons on LinkedIn? What do you do beyond that?

I’ve been getting a lot of questions on how to properly prep for a meeting, how much time should be spent on prepping, and what I do personally to prep.

I thought it was about time to help unlock the mystery of what you should actually do and think about to properly prepare. You can call it advanced prepping, or just good prepping. Either way, the point is to level-up your conversions with leads and prospects by knowing who you’re talking to and being able to align the conversation to their needs and personality.

This advanced prepping article will cover a few key areas to help you do so:

• the three things you should always prep for
• how much time you should devote each week to prepping
• how to be mentally present for each conversation  

The Three Things You Should Always Prep For 

It’s pretty simple when you break it down. Yet, a lot of salespeople stop at just researching the company and forget that they’re talking to an actual person. When researching your prospect, you also want to know about the needs and wants of the role you’re speaking to and the personality and background of the individual.

The Company

Look at how does this company make money and drive revenue? If you don’t know this to start, figure out how you can positively impact the business? If it’s available, their annual report is a good resource. You can just read the executive summary, and get a lot of valuable information from that without having to know how to read an entire annual report. The summary will give you a good idea of what the company truly cares about. 

Researching the company is where a significant majority of salespeople spend their time. It’s a good first step, but you don’t want to stop here. 

The Role

Prepping for the role or job function is essentially buyer persona work: knowing what that role cares about, what you do that can impact their world, and what they are measured on for success. 

For example, maybe you’re already familiar with manufacturing companies, but are you prepared to meet with a person in Operations? Operations is going to care about things like controlling costs, so how does your product or service impact that need and help them succeed versus if you were talking to someone in Product? 

That’s where a lot of salespeople fall short.

The Person

The last, and kind of bonus thing to research while prepping, is understanding the person. When you look them up on LinkedIn, look at how they describe themselves and their role. Do they talk about cutting-edge topics, what do they post about or share, have they been in the position for 15 years or 5 months? The person and the conversation are going to be very different based on those factors.

If you are going to have multiple people in a meeting, then you’ll have to rinse and repeat. You’ll want to know about the personality and role of every person present. You’re going to have to be able to speak to the different value props for each individual within the meeting, as well as the company itself. 

For more helpful videos like the one above, head over to my YouTube page

Are You Devoting Enough Time to Prep?

There isn’t an exact percentage of time that you should be dedicating each week to prep. It’s all relative to the deal and meeting size.

• Is it a smaller, transactional deal or a more considerable investment? 
• Is it a 30-minute discovery, hour-long demo, or two-hour pitch to the executive team? 
• Are you meeting with one person or multiple?

A good rule of thumb, if you want a number on the length of prep, is to take the length of the meeting and cut it in half for smaller prospects (15 min prep for a 30 min meeting; 30 min prep for a 60 min meeting). If it’s a larger deal, you’ll probably want to spend the same amount of time prepping as the length of the meeting. 

Over time, hopefully, you know your buyer persona’s like your best friend and your prep will get shorter and shorter as you pitch to e.g., a VP of Product at a mid-sized company over and over again.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator also has a really useful and easy app that allows you to pull up and research the individual you’re meeting with to quickly get a beat on their role and how they communicate for those smaller deals. 

If you have multiple people in a room and it’s a six to seven-figure deal, your prep is going to surpass the amount of time it takes to conduct the real meeting. I mentioned understanding the value props and personalities per person in the previous section. For deals this size with multiple people, your prep will need to be taken one step further: to role-playing. 

Role-Playing

You should spend hours role-playing what’s going to go wrong and what’s going to go right; what is going to resonate with one individual over another. To level-up the conversation in these settings, it’s really about role-playing objections over and over again as opposed to just prepping on the company, roles, and individuals.

Be Mentally Present For the Conversation

The reason why I put so much emphasis on prep is so I can be mentally present in a meeting. 

We’ve all been in those situations at one point or another where we have to continuously think about what to say next or look at our notes multiple times. When this happens, we’re not able to be there with the room. 

If you have to continually think about what to say next in your presentation, then you can’t read people’s reactions or know what’s going well and what isn’t hitting home. The reason I’m a prep monster is because good preparation allows me to be a better me in a meeting, or speaking at a conference, or co-hosting a webinar, etc. It’s almost like creating a safe place, so you don’t feel overwhelmed by a new situation you haven’t prepared for. Some people are outstanding in these situations, but most of us aren’t and can’t share our true value if we’re nervous due to lack of preparation.

My Last Piece of Advice for Better Conversations

Probably the more complicated, yet more essential thing salespeople need to pay more attention to, is the actual person on the other end of the phone or across the table. You’re meeting with human beings that have individual priorities and needs. If you’re able to spend just a bit more time learning about the person you’re talking to, you’re going to be way more successful than the other seller that knows every single thing about that person’s company.

Prep for the person. You're speaking to humans.

If you enjoyed this blog and want more content from me, follow me on Twitter @JakeTDunlap