Use POP to Make Every Customer Meeting More Valuable
Meetings are as much a part of the fabric of the business day as the coffee on your desk in the morning. We meet to plan meetings, to design future meetings, to discuss meetings we already had, and sometimes because a meeting mysteriously appeared on the calendar. The only problem is that we enjoy the coffee considerably more.
If that's true for you, keep in mind it's true for your clients as well.
The good news is that meeting preparation is one of the cheapest advantages available to a sales team. Ten minutes of thought, applied consistently, changes how clients experience working with you. Here's the approach I teach for doing it.
What POP stands for
POP stands for Purpose, Outcomes and Process. Three repeatable steps you can use to plan, and then collaborate around, every client meeting you will ever schedule.
Purpose defines what you are trying to accomplish and why the participants benefit
Outcomes define the takeaways each person leaves with
Process defines the steps, the owners and the time each step gets
That's the whole framework. Its value isn't sophistication. Its value is that a busy salesperson will actually use it on a Monday morning with a Thursday client meeting looming.
Why it works
POP makes meetings easier to plan, easier to run, and much easier to follow up on, because the commitments made in the meeting have somewhere to live. It also does something subtler. When you send a draft POP to your client and ask for their input, you have turned a routine invitation into a small act of collaboration. They are shaping the meeting with you before it starts.
Ten minutes is the entire investment. I call these the ten most important minutes of your day, and I mean it. They determine whether ten professionals spend two hours productively or spend two hours in a room while two of them talk.
The test of a good POP
If a participant reads your POP and can immediately answer what this meeting is about, why they need to be there, and what they will leave with, you have done it correctly. If they cannot, you have written an agenda with better formatting.
Writing a sharper purpose statement
The first P answers two questions: what and why.
What is the specific work to be completed
Why will the participants benefit when that work is done
Worthy intent does real work here. When you keep the group's best interests at the front of your mind while deciding whether to call the meeting, it becomes much easier to see who should attend and whether the meeting is needed at all.
Six questions to answer before you write it
What am I trying to accomplish?
Why will the participants benefit?
Do I have the right attendees?
Do I need this many attendees?
Do I need more or less time?
Do I even need to call this meeting?
That last question is the one people skip. Many meetings exist because they were already scheduled, so we might as well hold them. A purpose statement will occasionally rescue everyone's calendar by revealing that no meeting is required. Your client will notice that too.
Weak versus sharp
A weak purpose reads like a topic. "Quarterly review with the client team."
A sharp purpose reads like this. "To review Q3 delivery performance against the service levels we committed to in March, so the client team can decide whether to expand the pilot to two additional sites."
The first tells people a meeting is happening. The second tells them why their attendance matters and what is at stake. One sentence, ninety seconds of thought, and a completely different meeting.
Designing real outcomes instead of vague agendas
Outcomes are the takeaways each participant leaves with. They are also the fastest way to solve the attendee problem that derails so many customer meetings.
If you invest the time to determine the outcomes first, the participant list builds itself. When the purpose of the meeting is to update the client on the status of a prototype project, you can immediately identify which client team members need that information and which ones you are inviting out of politeness.
Review your drafted outcomes against three questions
Will everyone leave with a shared understanding of these takeaways?
Will each participant understand their role, responsibilities and next steps when the meeting concludes?
Are the takeaways reasonable, or are they overly ambitious for the time allotted?
That third question is where most meeting plans quietly fail. Four substantive outcomes in a sixty-minute meeting isn't a plan, it's a wish.
What good outcomes look like
For the quarterly review above, the outcomes might read:
A shared view of delivery performance against the March commitments
A documented list of the three gaps we will close before the next review
A decision on the two-site pilot expansion, or a clear list of what is needed to make that decision
Notice that each one is something a participant could describe to a colleague the next day. Planning outcomes this way saves your time and your client's time, helps you assemble the right mix of professionals, and continues to distinguish you throughout the process.
Building a process that keeps meetings on track
The second P is the process, meaning the actual steps your meeting will follow to reach the purpose and the outcomes.
This is where POP diverges most sharply from a standard agenda. A typical agenda is a list of discussion points that participants do not get through because of poor planning and loose facilitation. The points that do get covered are not always captured or followed up on, and the rest drift into future meetings. A process assigns every item an owner and a time, which is what guarantees the items actually get covered.
A sample meeting process
Update on commitments from the previous meeting (meeting leader)
Introduce the first topic (topic leader)
Dialogue on the topic (group)
Capture agreements and commitments (note taker)
Introduce the next topic (topic leader)
Repeat the dialogue and capture steps
Arrive at a path forward (meeting leader)
Close the meeting within the promised time (meeting leader)
A real example
Here's a POP I completed for a meeting with Vistage International.
Purpose. To share the Relational Capital workshop with Vistage International members, so that participants leave with new perspective on advancing their most important business relationships.
Outcomes. A repeatable process to identify, assess and proactively improve the participants' most important business relationships. An Action Plan.
Process. Introduction and opening exercise (Ed and group, 15 minutes). Share workshop outline and process (Ed, 15 minutes). Discuss the Essential Qualities of Relational Capital (Ed and group, 30 minutes). Break (15 minutes). Relational Ladder exercises (group, 60 minutes). Summary and follow-up assignments (Ed, 10 minutes).
Two things are worth noticing. Every item has an owner and a duration. And the whole thing fits on half a page, which is why it gets used.
How to socialize POP across a sales team
A framework only creates value when it becomes a habit, and habits in sales teams are built by managers, not by documents.
Make it the standard, not the suggestion
Attach a POP to every customer meeting above a defined threshold, whether that is deal size, executive attendance or strategic account status
Ask for the POP in your one-on-ones and pipeline reviews, in the same breath as next steps
Store it where the opportunity lives, so the commitments captured in the meeting carry into the next one
Have your strongest reps share the POPs that produced good meetings, so people learn from real examples rather than a template
Set the field rules
Send the draft POP to the client at least two days ahead and ask for their upgrades
Send any pre-reading along with it
Ask a participant to capture notes and commitments during the meeting
Stay focused on the agreed purpose
Put a device rule in place, so people talk to each other during the breaks instead of clearing their inbox
Plan one topic to run short, so the meeting can end early
Know what adoption looks like
You will know POP has taken hold when two things start happening. Your team plans meetings this way without being asked. And your clients begin complimenting you on the care you take with your interactions, which is a compliment very few vendors ever receive.
That compliment is worth more than it sounds. It's your client telling you, in their own words, that you have moved out of the vendor category.
If you want help adapting POP to the customer and internal meetings your team already runs, and building it into your existing review rhythm rather than adding another process on top, let us talk it through.
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