Heavy Hitter Sales Blog

Five Presidents Club Meeting Ideas

Although the Internal Revenue Service requires you to conduct business-related meetings at your annual President’s Club, there’s no reason why the meetings have to be boring, unimaginative, and dry. Instead, reward your company’s Heavy Hitters (truly great salespeople) with a unique program they are sure to find engaging, enlightening, and entertaining.

Your Presidents Club is a once a year opportunity to recognize the contributions of the key sales leaders who have helped make your company a success. These top performers don’t want to spend half of their day listening to another state-of-the-union company update. They want to learn something new about the topics which interest them the most. Equally important, they want to share a laugh or two with the other Heavy Hitters in attendance.  With this in mind, here are five Presidents Club recommendations:

1. Focus on Soft Skills Improvements. Because all the attendees have mastered the “process” of selling, the focus should be on improving their intangible and intuitive sales skills. These soft skills include the art of persuasion, building rapport, and maximizing their sales intuition. For example, a favorite topic that I like to present at Presidents Clubs is neurolinguistics (the study of how the mind processes and interprets language) and the role that psychology plays during the customer’s decision-making process.

2. Provide Sales Career Advice. The life of a salesperson is far from perfect. Everyone in the profession has trials and tribulations. They experience incredible highs, tremendous lows, and a constant fear of the unknown. Arm them with mental and emotional training to deal with the stress and uncertainty. This will not only make them a better salesperson, but a better person as a whole.

3. Conduct a Study of your Heavy Hitters. Think about it for a moment, you have assembled your best salespeople from all around the world. Why not conduct a study to understand how and why they are successful? Take some time to interview your Heavy Hitters about the strategies and tactics they use to win business. Document this information so that it can be shared with your entire sales organization. This valuable advice will help every salesperson understand and emulate the behavior of your very best salespeople.

4. Furnish Some Sales Adrenaline! Every long-term salesperson knows they need an occasional shot of sales adrenaline to renew their sense of excitement. Instead of parading the same old company executives in front of the team, bring in a sales-related motivational speaker to provide a fresh perspective and mental refreshment about the noble career of sales.

5. Give Them “Meaningful” Gifts. Forget about presenting the winners with a souvenir beach towel or company pen; give them the gift of knowledge that will last a lifetime. Furnish books about advanced sales techniques and marketing strategies that will help them succeed in the tough times of today so they make Presidents Club next year!

You want to ensure every detail of your President’s Club is perfect and the event to be long remembered because it will be the topic of company conversations for months to come. Never forget, the most frequent question salespeople ask of each other throughout the year is, “Do you think you will make Presidents Club?” Click here for more information about conducting the perfect Presidents Meeting.

2008: Do You Want to Be a (Penta) Millionaire?

In order to be counted among the richest 1% of Americans you must be a pentamillionaire and have a net worth over $5 million. Today, there are more than 930,000 pentamillionaires. Anne Kadet of SmartMoney.com wrote a very interesting article about what it takes to become rich. As you read the excerpts below, note the striking similarities between becoming a pentamillionaire and a Heavy Hitter (a truly great salesperson).

• The people who amassed their fortunes are, first and foremost, entrepreneurs — risk takers for whom wealth is a byproduct of pursuing their passion. Only 10% of pentamillionaires inherited their wealth. One might think that good fortune would play a role, but even luck is largely a matter of one's own making. Psychologist Richard Wiseman has found that people who describe themselves as lucky share common habits that account for their success: They're friendly and fond of new experiences, traits that put them on a collision course with new opportunities. In addition, "lucky" folks simply have higher expectations of success — they're too pigheadedly optimistic to heed the long odds and call it quits.                          

• Not to say that getting rich is simply a matter of having a swell attitude. The path to riches usually involves the kind of risk that would make most people feel a little queasy. Harrison Group head Jim Taylor recently persuaded more than 3,000 pentamillionaires to discuss their path to success. Perhaps not surprisingly, none of them had a cushy union job down at the DMV.

• Surprisingly, today's very rich say that money itself wasn't much of a motivator. Once you've got food in your belly and a big-screen TV, the mere prospect of more Benjamins isn't enough to get you leaping out of bed at 5 a.m. Rather, rich folks often make their fortunes after they make up their minds to solve a problem or do something better than it's been done before.

• Getting rich also requires a certain amount of stubbornness and clarity of purpose. Being rich means freedom: to spend your time as you please, to pursue your real interests and to take a chance without courting utter ruin. Paradoxically, the road to riches often means acting as if you already have that freedom.