Should anyone from your company attend your Buyer Roundtable peer conversation?
Remember you’re setting up this conversation to allow your stuck leads and customers to have a conversation with their peers about a problem they all have, which you can solve.
They’re not here to listen to you or your colleagues.
Invite your colleagues but remind them to be silent. If you’re doing this in a virtual meeting (and you should because you’ll learn a lot faster when you can do more of these at a lower cost and more frequently) tell your team to keep their cameras off and to stay muted.
It doesn’t hurt to have them remove their titles from their profiles either. It’s not important that they’re the CEO or VP Sales or whatever. It’s a distraction.
Invite someone from sales so they can learn what each lead is really struggling with. The reason for their next phone call to that lead will become obvious.
Invite someone from marketing to learn what people in this peer group care about and the words they use to describe the problems they have and the solutions they want. Invite someone from the product team.
At the same time, don’t overwhelm the meeting with a ton of non-participants.
The peer group can feel like they’re being mobbed. You don’t want that.
Here’s a heuristic for you to consider: Keep the number of people from your company to fewer than a quarter of attendees.
If your attendees consent to it, record the conversation and show it to your team later instead of inviting them.
I tend not to record these meetings because I find people are more forthcoming when they don’t have to worry about being recorded if they mistakenly let something slip.
Take it easy on them. Make them comfortable. Definitely don’t record by default or without their knowledge. Don’t do that thing where you ambush record them. I’m talking about when they show up for the meeting and there’s a warning that says “This meeting is being recorded”.
Have someone take notes during the meeting and share those with the rest of your team.
Use the insights IMMEDIATELY in sales calls and marketing messages.
Try hosting a peer conversation this month. They’re really effective at accelerating sales.
If you get stuck or don’t have the team to do it yourself give me a call.