How does meet and engage work?

Meet and engage is a business strategy focused on building relationships with potential customers through in-person interactions. The goal is to establish connections and nurture leads through face-to-face meetings, rather than relying solely on inbound marketing tactics. Implementing a meet and engage approach requires proactively seeking out and meeting with qualified prospects to educate them on your offerings, demonstrate value, and work towards converting them into customers.

What are the benefits of meet and engage?

There are several key advantages to incorporating meet and engage into your sales and marketing strategy:

• Builds trust and rapport – In-person meetings allow you to establish deeper connections with prospects versus digital interactions alone.
• Enables customized engagements – You can tailor your messaging and offers to each prospect’s unique needs and interests during live conversations.
• Provides a captive audience – Prospects are more focused on you and your content during a face-to-face meeting versus an impersonal email.
• Generates faster sales cycles – Meeting in-person typically accelerates the sales process versus only using inbound tactics.
• Increases customer lifetime value – Customers generated from high-touch selling typically have higher retention rates and lifetime values.

In summary, meet and engage selling builds stronger relationships, enables more customized conversations, captures greater attention, speeds up sales, and drives higher long-term value compared to digital-only lead generation strategies.

How does meet and engage work?

Implementing an effective meet and engage strategy involves several key steps:

1. Identifying your total addressable market and ideal customer profiles.
2. Researching and qualifying prospective accounts that fit your buyer personas.
3. Crafting personalized outreach messaging that resonates with each prospect.
4. Conducting outbound campaigns via cold calls, emails, LinkedIn, etc. to connect with prospects.
5. Scheduling initial meetings – typically 30 mins – with qualified prospects to introduce yourself, build rapport, and identify needs.
6. Preparing customized presentations and collateral to showcase your solutions.
7. Conducting thorough follow-ups after initial meetings to provide additional value.
8. Developing long-term relationships and nurturing prospects through robust sales pipelines.
9. Closing business and expanding accounts through systematic account management.

The key activities involved in executing a meet and engage strategy include researching target buyer personas and accounts, running tailored outbound campaigns, having consultative sales conversations, providing personalized follow-up, and maintaining robust sales pipeline hygiene.

What tactics and tools are used?

Here are some of the key tactics and tools used to enable effective meet and engage strategies:

Outbound prospecting

• Cold calling – telephoning prospects to introduce your business, qualify accounts, and schedule meetings.
• Email outreach – sending personalized emails to engage target accounts.
• Social selling – leveraging platforms like LinkedIn to connect with prospects.
• Networking – attending events, conferences, tradeshows to meet and connect with prospects.
• Referrals – leveraging existing customer networks to get introductions to new prospects.

CRM platform

• Central database to store prospect/client information.
• Tools to track interactions, meetings, and pipeline.
• Sales automation to nurture leads with follow-ups.

Marketing automation

• Automated campaigns to follow up and re-engage prospects.
• Lead scoring to gauge prospect interest and sales readiness.
• Tools to track prospect engagement across channels.

Sales enablement

• Prospecting lists to identify target accounts.
• Call scripts to standardize outreach messaging.
• Presentations, brochures, whitepapers to support meetings.
• Proposal templates to drive faster deal completion.

Leveraging the right mix of outbound tactics, sales technology, and content enablement is crucial for executing a scalable and effective meet and engage strategy.

What are the steps in the meet and engage process?

Here is an overview of the typical end-to-end workflow for a meet and engage sales process:

1. Targeting – Identify prospects that fit your ideal customer profile using research, referrals, event attendance lists, etc.
2. Outreach – Make initial connections with prospects via cold calls, emails, social media, networking, etc.
3. Qualification – Gauge fit, need, timing and budget through discovery questions.
4. Meeting – Schedule and hold introductory meeting to build rapport, discuss needs, and determine next steps.
5. Presentation – Provide a customized overview of your offerings and value proposition.
6. Follow Up – Send relevant content, answers, and resources discussed during the meeting.
7. Relationship Building – Continue nurturing the prospect through helpful check-ins and valuable information.
8. Proposal – Present a formal offer to provide products/services tailored to their needs.
9. Negotiation – Discuss, clarify, and finalize the scope, pricing, terms, etc.
10. Closed-Won – Handoff the new customer to account management to drive expansion.

The core components involve outreach, discovery, presentation, follow-up, negotiation, and expansion. Meeting face-to-face is the consistent thread woven throughout each step of the process.

What metrics are used to track performance?

Key performance indicators used to track meet and engage programs include:

Activity and reach metrics

• Contacts identified
• Outbound contacts attempted
• Successful contacts made
• Meetings scheduled
• Meetings held

Pipeline metrics

• New opportunities created
• Sales pipeline generated
• Opportunity conversion rate
• Average sales cycle length

Revenue metrics

• New customer acquisition
• Sales revenue generated
• Sales team rep productivity
• Cost per acquisition
• Customer lifetime value

Tracking prospecting activity, pipeline health, and sales performance provides a comprehensive view into the effectiveness and ROI of meet and engage initiatives.

What are some best practices?

Some proven best practices for executing successful meet and engage sales programs include:

• Clearly define your total addressable market and ideal customer profile.
• Build accountability into sales processes using SLA’s and metrics tracking.
• Develop branded, customized presentation content for meetings.
• Leverage sales enablement tools like call scripts and proposal templates.
• Use a CRM to capture meeting notes, track follow-ups, and update pipeline status.
• Set meetings quickly – capitalize on initial prospect engagement.
• Mix discovery questions into presentations to drive interactivity.
• Manage follow-up cadence in CRM based on lead temperature.
• Provide relevant resources and content to contacts after meetings.
• Measure effectiveness frequently and adjust strategy as needed.

The keys to success are targeting qualified accounts, systematically following up, demonstrating value quickly, capturing engagement insights in a CRM, and iterating to improve results.

What are some common meet and engage techniques?

Here are five proven techniques for executing impactful meet and engage sales meetings:

1. Lead with rapport building

Dedicate time upfront to build a personal connection – ask questions about professional background, business goals, challenges. Building rapport establishes trust.

2. Balance education with discovery

Share informative content balanced with asking discovery questions to understand pain points. Education positions you as an expert, while discovery exposes needs.

3. Convey value visually

Use presentations, demos, props, samples to showcase your offering. Visuals make your capabilities more tangible and memorable.

4. Manage engagements dynamically

Adapt conversations based on prospect responses and cues – lean into topics they respond well to. Dynamic engagements feel more natural than rigid scripts.

5. Have a clear CTA strategy

Know your meeting CTA’s ahead of time, such as scheduling a follow up, providing a proposal, or connecting on LinkedIn. Meetings should drive clear next steps.

Using rapport building, discovery, visuals, flexibility, and defined CTA’s drives more impactful first connections with prospects.

How is meet and engage different from other sales approaches?

Meet and engage stands apart from other sales methodologies in the following ways:

Sales Approach	Description	Key Differentiators
Inbound Marketing	Attracting prospects through digital content and channels like blogs, SEO, social media.	More passive, reactive approach. Requires prospects to self-identify.
Transactional Selling	Closing one-off sales using scripts and minimal customer relationship focus.	Limited ongoing value. Higher customer churn risk.
Consultative Selling	Building relationships with prospects and providing solutions tailored to needs.	Still reactive model relying on inbound leads. Less outbound focus.
Meet and Engage Selling	Proactively connecting with qualified prospects and building relationships face-to-face.	Outbound focus. Accelerated sales cycle from in-person meetings.

Meet and engage combines outbound, consultative selling with a process for proactively building connections and relationships with potential customers in-person and online.

What are some challenges with meet and engage?

While meet and engage can deliver strong results, there are some common challenges to be aware of:

• Long sales cycles – The high-touch process often requires months of nurturing to convert prospects.
• Difficulty scaling – Personal selling limits the number of prospects each rep can reasonably manage.
• Hitting voicemails – Prospects avoid answering cold calls, going to voicemail.
• Travel costs – In-person meetings outside your region incur higher costs.
• Appointment scheduling – Prospects delay committing to meetings due to busy schedules.
• CRM adoption – Getting sales reps to diligently log interactions and use CRM tools.

Key strategies for overcoming these challenges include persistence, leveraging marketing to generate inbound interest, focusing on quality conversations over quantity, prioritizing local prospects, adopting automated tools, and building a culture focused on consistent execution and pipeline management.

How can you optimize implementation?

Here are 5 tips for optimizing the execution of a meet and engage sales strategy:

1. Clearly define sales methodology, processes, workflows, terminology and metrics.
2. Provide extensive training for sales reps on strategies, tools, presentation content.
3. Set up sales reporting cadence – daily pipeline reviews, weekly win/loss reviews.
4. Implement sales enablement tools – call scripts, presentations, CRM, marketing automation.
5. Conduct quarterly business reviews and refine strategy.

A well-defined approach, training, reporting, enablement tools, and continuous improvement drive successful adoption and peak performance of meet and engage initiatives.

What tools support meet and engage strategies?

The key software platforms enabling meet and engage sales programs include:

CRM Systems

Store prospect data, interactions, pipeline status. Examples: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho

Marketing Automation

Orchestrate campaigns, monitor engagement, score leads. Examples: Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot

Sales Engagement

Empower outreach with email templates, voicemail drops. Examples: Outreach, SalesLoft

CRM Analytics

Provide insights into pipeline health, sales rep effectiveness. Examples: InsightSquared, Chartio

Sales Training

Improve selling skills via microlearning, role playing. Examples: MindTickle, LevelJump

This technology stack enables the execution, tracking and optimization of high-touch sales strategies centered on proactive outreach and face-to-face engagement.

Conclusion

Meet and engage selling focuses on building relationships and driving sales through personalized, consultative conversations with qualified prospects. It is an outbound, high-touch strategy focused on engaging the right contacts via meetings, calls, emails, social connections and networking. While requiring extensive effort, meet and engage provides a platform to convey value quickly, accelerate sales cycles, and build lasting customer relationships when executed effectively.