Coupled with another of your reasons for attending - the ability to meet and get to know strangers - this means that 'recruitment' will be on your agenda. Please be careful! Don't try to rush into 'induction training' too early, and don't neglect further training for existing team members. People who already know you, what you do and who you do it for, can be re-invigorated by some pertinent Continuing Professional Development (CPD).
Assuming you've broken the ice, established some rapport and are starting to enjoy each other's company, there is some pretty fundamental stuff you need to communicate, and then be sure has been received, understood and stored.
You can also use these same 'headings' when someone is recruiting and training you into their surrogate sales team. If you don't understand these things about them and their business, you won't be an effective member of their team, so don't be afraid of letting them know you haven't quite got the full picture. They will thank you for letting them help you be a better ambassador for their organisation, and they might just get better at explaining themselves in the future. You will need to know:
- How to identify their Ideal Customers, using only public domain information - e.g. 10 to 40 person accountancy practices within 30 miles of Cambridge
- What 'symptoms' to look out for when you encounter one - e.g. Suffering from cash-flow problems
- How to check these really are symptoms of a 'disease' they can cure - e.g. They can only fix some of these personally: Low sales? Unprofitable sales? Excessive debtor days? High overheads? Inefficient staff and/or procedures?
- How to explain how wonderful life would be without these symptoms
- How to indirectly establish enough credibility for them, to allow contact
Neither of you is trying to get the other to sell their product or service for them! What what both of you want the other to do is gain permission to broker an introduction, and then do so.
The sales training you do with your team on these occasions can be similar to training a 'regular', employed sales team.
- Some members of the team will be performing better than others, so study and analyse what they do, and share the ideas with the rest of the team
- Make study and analysis a continual activity, not a one-off fait accompli
- Best practice has to constantly evolve - something new might make the best even better
- Best practice may need to adapt rapidly to sudden changes in the market
- Don't neglect the 'tried and tested' techniques that new recruits can adopt, without fear of your (management's) disapproval
- Ask the entire team for ideas - "What's working for you right now?"
Again the best could get even better. Modelling the best is just a starting point, a benchmark, a springboard, so accept ideas from anywhere.
Just as with a 'regular' team, you need to encourage communication within the team and with 'management'. Encourage discussion of difficulties and have systems in place for team members to debate specific issues amongst themselves as well as with you.
As well as understanding prospects' problems and circumstances, all the team must be able to access the information which allows them to understand your problems and your circumstances. By this I mean that they need to know the questions you (management) will ask as part of monitoring their performance, so they will have asked their own questions of the prospect and have answers ready for you. They will be able to monitor their own performance against these well-publicised and understood rules too. Bi-directional feedback will be of great help in resolving any bottlenecks.
For your surrogate team, out there prospecting on your behalf, processes and later developments of them will only work if the team 'buy into' them. Your surrogate team need to feel listened to, the processes need to make sense, and they need to be extremely simple to follow.
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