There will be times when an interesting opportunity or meeting crests quickly and there is precious little time between when you get the call and when you need to show up at the client’s site with a selling squad.

Because you are now doing more focused work on qualifying opportunities, you most likely are more comfortable with prioritizing and preparing for your best opportunities. However, there is less time to devote to low-priority prospects.

Still, you will take such meetings for various reasons and you will find that there simply isn’t the time to prepare the way you would for a top-shelf, qualified opportunity, even though there will be multiple players on your team and the client’s side of the table. You understand that your team’s chances of getting in sync as an effective selling squad, in the limited time available, are exceedingly low.

Common Traps

When time is short, you may end up making some of these mistakes:

   Use a cookie-cutter approach to similar meetings in the past: same people, materials, and agenda. Whatever, let’s do it.

   Wing it. Most sales professionals and those who participate frequently in sales meetings consider themselves quick on their feet. This confidence is multiplied when you have a group of colleagues who work together often, know each other well, and have a successful track record.

   Share minimal communication in advance of the meeting. Knowledge transfer may be accomplished through a single e-mail that combines meeting details plus background information on the buying organization and sales opportunity.

Best Practices for Hitting the “ICE” Button

Hitting the ICE (“in case of emergency”) button is reserved for those cases when you’re short on time and unable to prepare to sell like a team as we have discussed up to this point. I want to be super-clear here: hitting the ICE button will not win a high-stakes opportunity against strong competition. This will, however, allow you and your colleagues to progress from feeling totally unprepared to somewhat prepared. I feel confident that if being “somewhat prepared” is what you are aiming for in your sales meetings, you wouldn’t have purchased or read this far in this book. So I offer the following comments as not a cure-all, but as a last-minute cure-a-little.

I have found that once teams begin using the process described in this book for their qualified and important sales meetings, they are less willing to take meetings they cannot be fully prepared for and ones that take them away from better opportunities. When you consider hitting the ICE button, either by choice or out of necessity, narrow your prep activities to the five following items, each of which you will recognize from earlier in the book:

1.   Knowledge leveling: Focus your team’s attention on what the client or prospect is trying to accomplish, and why. Use the four questions to determine whether a qualified opportunity exists. Whatever you are unable to answer will form your priority questions for the meeting. Assuming you decide to pursue an opportunity with this customer, you can figure out where this opportunity, the people with whom you are meeting, and your company’s past work fit into the customer organization.

2.   Roles and goals: When time is short, I find that selling teams often fall back into their organizational roles. Someone on the selling squad must take the lead. If there is no clear choice, select as your leader the person with the most client knowledge or at least the skills to manage the team and the meeting. Also define how the others on the team will support the leader. As for goals, see if you can agree on what you can realistically walk away from this meeting with—a verbal or written agreement, a recommendation to the board, a follow-up meeting including others within the next three weeks. Walking in with a clear goal—as imperfect as it might be—around which the team is unified has a magical way of creating shared intent and focus. Even when you and your team are not as prepared as you’d like to be.

3.   Opening: Sort out how introductions will be handled and in what sequence. It takes only a few minutes to run through this a few times in the car on the way to the meeting. Getting this right gives your team an early win and builds team confidence and momentum.

4.   Agenda/responsibilities: Break down the meeting into a few simple parts. This allows the client to keep track with you, and also enables the team to keep the discussion on track. Here is a generic example that can work:

We’re planning on covering three topics today: (1) make sure we understand all the dimensions of your request, (2) share some initial ideas and experiences related to the topic, and (3) define next steps around where your needs and our abilities overlap. How does that sound as a game plan for today’s discussion?

Think: (1) needs, (2) ideas, (3) action plan. Stay focused as a team. For each topic, be clear on who owns it. For last-minute meetings, I find it best to minimize the number of handoffs. My default recommendation is that the team leader takes primary responsibility for all topics and signals team members in and out within each topic. This is easier to visualize and manage without preparation.

5.   The close: The team leader will typically close—but work out how. This can be done in about a minute and can make the difference between leaving the meeting with an order or a handful of air. If you are the leader, practice your ask until it feels natural and on point with your meeting goal.

Two Final Tips on Last-Minute Preparation

There are two points worth adding to the short-cut tips mentioned above. First, materials don’t win or lose opportunities; teams do. So, when time is short, don’t waste time on customizing a presentation. Use a standard or recent presentation. That said, if you’re bringing materials, each team member should choose and know where to find one “power page” that illustrates a process, design, or structure, for example, and from which a team member’s comments can be launched.

Second, SOS signals, like the word bluebird, are effective when the team has time to practice with it. When this is not possible, insist upon a no-improvisation rule. Rather, when a team member picks up on something, commit to the process of posing questions to one other to maintain your ability to adapt during the meeting. For example, your product specialist picks up a cue that the client stakeholder’s goals are different from what you assumed. Here is an example of how that specialist might signal that to the team leader: “Tim, it seems as if XYZ Associates is more focused on driving growth in a new channel. How would that change your reply to that question?”

In summary, these five steps will not transform a losing effort. They may, however, keep your chances alive, allow you to qualify the opportunity, and enter the meeting room more prepared than three strangers who wandered in off the street.