Revenue leader’s guide to successful board meetings!

It’s pretty standard for sales leaders to get invited to board meetings. So, what do you do when called in to present your sales strategy and report card to the Board? At Nektar.ai, we spoke to 72 professionals who have been Board members, VP Sales, Founders and CEOs and asked them this very same question. This playbook is a result of those responses and best practices.

Like any deal in your CRM system, where you define your sales process, you need to break your board interaction into logical stages.

  • Pre-meeting: What’s the construct of the Board? Research about the board members and the role they play. What’s the preparation required for the board meeting?

Pre-Meeting Checklist

  • Understand the dynamics of the Board. A VP of sales must analyze their Board, similar to drawing an account plan and relationship map for a strategic prospect. E.g. Which board members are very involved in the strategy side and significantly influence the Board? Which members are functional experts and tend to get operationally active? What are the backgrounds of the various members? What role do they play?

In-Meeting Checklist

  • Keep it contextual & crisp. Your Board members will never have the context, but you do. When you share your strategy, you need to meet them at their level. Most investors usually fly around 30k feet & do not have the time or interest in coming down. They need to grasp your strategy quickly & not get over-involved in a barrage of details. Remember, Less is More!

For you to be prepared with these responses, you must have a well-defined sales process and playbook. If implemented and tracked well, the sales playbook and the deviations to the same will give you enough insight into:

  • Why do sales reps go off script during the calls?

Now imagine, if you can operationalize and track your sales process and usage of the winning playbooks, the answers to the probing questions with data-backed responses can be like:

  • Based on the 15 deal reviews, we found a trend in discovery calls going off-script when sales professionals get to budget-related conversations. To fix this, we have modified our calling script to help the sales team be more confident when talking about our pricing and value delivered.

Post-Meeting Checklist

  • Connect formally and ask for help when needed. The majority of the board members like to engage more with the leadership team between the board meetings to help.

Summary

The Board members play an essential role in organizations. They provide excellent advice and of course, they apply pressure and ask tough questions. For sales leaders, those questions can be pretty intimidating. The answers often lie in their notepad or are buried deep in CRM reports, or are based on hunches or anecdotes from conversations with their sales team.

Whether sales leaders like it or not, they must articulate (or even proactively provide) data points to the Board that will help their team make adjustments based upon factual data and insights. However, attaining those helpful data points is much easier said than done, and one needs to get the playbook right. I hope the above playbook will help you to navigate your next board meeting successfully!

About Nektar.AI

Sales teams have one job — to hit the sales quota every quarter. However, more than 50% of teams out there are unable to do it. Nektar.ai is on a mission to make every rep successful in meeting their quota.

We are reimagining the future of modern sales by building a first-of-its-kind AI assistant that guides sales teams towards smashing their quotas and will help them to win bigger deals faster. It also allows sales managers to provide an ‘Always On’ coaching to their sales teams and assists in operationalizing the successful playbooks at scale across the team. Register to be on our early access list.

Originally published at https://nektar.ai on October 2, 2020.

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Been part of an amazing growth journey in building & leading a multi-Million, multi-region $SaaS business. On course to relive that journey at Nektar.ai

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Abhijeet Vijayvergiya

Been part of an amazing growth journey in building & leading a multi-Million, multi-region $SaaS business. On course to relive that journey at Nektar.ai