Our sales meeting preparation checklist for wholesale sales reps who want to have more effective meetings and store visits with their retail buyers.

1. Post Link: The Sales Meeting Preparation Checklist
The Sales Meeting Preparation Checklist
Whether it’s at conferences, on blogs, or in books, there are a LOT of people out there
proffering sales advice––tips, tricks, strategies, tactics, and guides to closing more deals and
crushing your quota.
It’s certainly a subject that we discuss often here on the Handshake blog, but lately we’ve
noticed that across the “sales advice” landscape, you rarely find concrete recommendations on
how to prepare for each of those customer interactions.
Sure, there’s talk of “building relationships” and “asking the right questions,” but what does a
sales rep need to do in order to ensure each of their customer exchanges drives more business
for both buyer and seller?
For many wholesale sales reps, face-to-face in-store meetings are a relatively common––even
routine––occurrence. That fact alone presents a huge opportunity: the opportunity to really
differentiate your brand by providing a more value-add, insight-led sales experience to your
customers than ever before. Here’s our sales meeting preparation checklist, to help you
improve those store visits and have better conversations.
1. Check Customer Order History:
If you only remember one piece of counsel from this post, remember this one. Take the time to

2. thoroughly look over your customer’s order history before each appointment. It’s a wealth of
information, providing insight not only on what kinds of products your customers are likely to
reorder, but also an indication of your upsell opportunities with new products or lines.
2. Compile a Curated List of Products:
This is more relevant for wholesalers with very large catalogs, which can be extremely
overwhelming for a buyer. It’s become common knowledge that too much choice leads to more
indecision and fewer sales, and sales reps need to help mitigate that problem as much as
possible.
To build off our first point, checking customer order history can help you compile a set of
curated products for buyers to choose from. The ability to predict what buyers need and quickly
provide personalized recommendations can be an enormous advantage and even lead to larger
orders.
3. Educate Yourself On the Following:
Competitive Landscapeq
Product sales performanceq
Bestsellersq
Knowing the overarching trends affecting sales in your industry, along with how products are
performing at other retail stores in the same region is invaluable to your customers. Offering
these insights can increase your strategic value in the eyes of a retailer, and create a “business
partner” kind of relationship, rather than just a transactional one.
4. Be Sure to Have Updated Inventory Information––In Real-time If You Can
Get It:
Two issues constantly on a retailer’s mind are: 1) inventory and 2) sell-through. Coming to a
meeting prepared with inventory information will help prevent backorders (and unnecessary
surprises), and keep your retailers’ shelves stocked.
5. Get the minutiae out of the way.
You shouldn’t be spending any time during a sales meeting going over details like a customer’s
contact information, payment info, etc. Stop filling out paper order forms (which require you to
re-enter this kind of information each and every time), and opt for a digital solution that stores all
that information for you and automatically populates it in each order.
Too many sales reps come to their meetings insufficiently prepared for the conversation ahead.
Keep this checklist in mind, and set yourself––or your sales team––up for success. How do you
prepare for sales meetings and store visits? Let us know in the comments!
Post originally located at: www.handshake.com/blog/the-sales-meeting-preparation-checklist

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