The Importance of Debriefing after a meeting, and the Questions that help explore ways to improve.

The Importance of Debriefing and the Questions to go through after a meeting.

To get to the top in sales, business meetings or in your life, the most important work we need to do is the debrief.

Every meeting is a time for reflection, debrief about what happened, what did not happen, how the client reacted or did not react, why the client signed up or why they did not. Debriefing is an essential part of life and sales. The ability to walk through the meeting and see what areas you could have done better and what areas you feel like you hit the mark, or missed the mark.

If you have a team, be it face to face meetings or telemarketing, it is prudent to set up a debriefing time slot, something like every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.Debriefing should be focused on how the process of the meeting or phone call went and how well it was executed and how effectively the language both verbal and non-verbal was used.

When debriefing it is essential to focus on an open dialogue, a 2-way conversation that is also a coaching and learning experience.

To effectively debrief you can ask your salespeople or yourself the following questions;

1. What did you do right, what worked?
2. What did not work?
3. What did you NOT do?
4. What should you have done, or what did you learn?
5. What will you do going forward to correct or leverage?
6. What are the prospect’s largest problems? Did you uncover them?
7. How well did you attach solutions to the problems?
8. What were we trying to accomplish?
9. Where did we hit (or miss) the objectives? 
10. What caused the results?
11. What should we start, stop, or continue doing?

These questions are just a sample to help you modify to suit your personal sales process and team. Asking these type of questions will help you reposition yourself and learn and then grow.

At the end of each meeting, the goal is to always reflect and go through the comments the client brought up and how you handed them in the meeting, and if you could have handled them better.

Always debrief, always take the time to reflect. What I do is have a small book with me, and write down some keywords used throughout the meeting and what response I received from them. I also wrote down any objections that came up. In whatever industry you are, if you make a list of all the objections your clients come up with, you will quickly accumulate a list of a lot of the similar sort of objections. This is then where you know you need to spend time and energy refining your handling procedures and coming up with a minimum of 5 responses based on different client personalities and different environments.

Debriefing is about getting more and more prepared after each meeting for the next meeting. Self-reflection and debriefing is the most powerful strategy that can be adopted in order to serve your clients at the highest level possible.

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