Tomorrow, I am speaking at a National Sales Meeting for a major international insurance company. (My former employer!) Anyone in sales attends many national and regional sales and sales training events. Usually management covers such a huge amount of information, you feel as if you are trying to drink from a fire hose! A study shows that you lose 90% of information you hear after only TWO DAYS! How do you retain and apply the wealth of information you receive at these meetings?

Let me give you three strategies.

First, whenever you attend a major sales conference, make a list of three (3) people you want to meet with during the meeting. Sales leaders, experts in fields of interest to you, and home office support staff can provide you with valuable information and contacts to help you grow your sales business.

Second, I recommend that you buy a “Meetings Journal” for all of your notes from any training experience. (You can also keep notes from books and CD’s in this resource.) Too often we make notes on a legal pad, or a handout, and they go into a file…never to be seen again! You can get a journal at Office Depot, Office Max, Staples, or any office supply store. One company that makes these journals is Wilson Jones, from ACCO Brands. You can see their products at http://www.acco.com/wilsonjones/ They come with lined, numbered pages, and you build a table of contents in the back as you go. Title and date each page. By using this journal, I always have all of my notes in one place, and it becomes a great tool to help me rediscover old sales gems. This strategy has served me well for over 15 years!

Third, pay attention to your notes. Take notes in chronological order, but also set up “Topic,” “Quote,” and “To-Do” Pages. When you hear a solid idea or sales line, put it in your chronological notes AND on the appropriate additional page. When the meeting is over, IMMEDIATELY go to these additional pages, and circle the very best ideas to implement in your business plan. Schedule the second tier ideas for later in the year.

Companies spend huge amounts of time, energy, and money on sales conferences and conventions. You take time out of the field to attend. Using these ideas help them…and YOU…get the most out of the investment as you grow your business!

Good selling!

Referrals and introductions drive the business of top professional salespeople. Among the myriad of prospecting techniques, Referred Lead Prospecting makes the most sense for several reasons:

• Referrals are a low-cost lead acquisition strategy
• Referrals help prospects feel comfortable with you, because you were introduced
• Centers of Influence have a tendency to self-replicate if you keep your sales and service promises
• Once you build a referral network, your new product and service offerings spread like wildfire, because people in your network talk to each other more often than you know
• Building referral marketing technologies are relatively simple

Referral marketing works best when you NETWORK with others. Among the many networking strategies, one of the best known is BNI (Business Networking International), which organizes referral networks for sales professionals and entrepreneurs. The following comes from BNI’s website, which is www.bni.com :

“The World’s Largest Referral Organization Welcome to our website. BNI is the largest business networking organization in the world. It offers members the opportunity to share ideas, contacts and most importantly, business referrals.”

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