The Ketchup is Out of the Bottle: Our First SAM Peer Group Meeting!

We had our first SAM peer advisory group meetings this week in Raleigh. I had mentioned in my last article that the anticipation of getting these groups up and running is a lot like waiting for the Heinz ketchup to come out of the bottle. Now the ketchup is out…so how did it go?

I’d love for some of the BCA members who attended to post their thoughts about the meetings, but from where I sat, they were fantastic. Attendance was good and will continue to grow, but most importantly, the people who were there really got involved and contributed. They came with issues to discuss and opinions based on their experiences for the other members.

As facilitators of the group, neither me nor my colleague Angela King are exempt from being on either side of the advice, so we too gave it out as much as we took it. I walked away with some great ideas of how to do things a little bit differently, both with our sales team and with the business in general.

What always amazes me is how at the beginning of the meeting, someone will always say “I think we all have the same problem…finding more business,” however inevitably as we continue to move from person to person and issue to issue it becomes abundantly clear that things run deeper than simply how to find more clients. We end up defining ideal clients, which are not always the same for the different members of the group; looking at ways each company finds those prospects and makes them clients, which is also not only unique from company to company, but from person to person within the company (which opens up a whole new can of worms discussing sales process!) We also talked about issues in motivating salespeople and came to the unanimous decision that if you have to spend too much time motivating a salesperson, he or she is probably not the right person to help your company grow.

Every SAM group meeting is different because the meeting belongs to the members. It is their time to discuss their own issues, challenges, opportunities and goals. BCA members are a strong group so starting out with them as the base and adding members from there makes a lot of sense. I want to send a special thank you out to Penn Shore, market owner of BCA of the Triangle, for working with us to get these groups up and running. We hope as we continue to add more members to our SAM groups that we can also reciprocate by inviting them to other events that the BCA puts on every month.

Tags: Business, Marketing, Sales