By: Jerry Murphy, Senior Consultant (Financial Services Practice), Optimé
Inside and external wholesalers are feeling it.
Meetings are harder to secure. Attention spans are thinner. And when a call does get booked, there’s an unspoken rule:
“This had better move something forward.”
So preparation gets blamed.
It feels heavy. Time-consuming. Never-ending.
But preparation isn’t the problem. Reinvention is.
You Don’t Run 25 Meetings a Week
You run the same few—repeated.
Across a month or quarter, most wholesalers rotate through versions of four core conversations:
- A first meeting with a prospect
- A follow-up call
- A product review discussion
- A cross-selling or new allocation conversation
You might add one or two more. You won’t get to ten.
And yet many wholesalers prepare as if every meeting is a brand-new strategic event.
That’s why prep feels exhausting. You’re not preparing. You’re recreating.
Most of the Work Should Already Be Decided
For repeatable meeting types, the heavy lifting shouldn’t happen the night before.
It should have been decided once—by meeting type.
In advance, you should have clarity on:
- The objective – What does “success” look like for this type of conversation?
- The agenda – How should the discussion be framed and sequenced, so it actually leads somewhere?
- The key messages – What must be clearly understood before the call ends?
- The questions that matter most – The few that consistently uncover what you need to know to move the conversation forward—and truly Play Catch™ with the advisor.
- The likely objections – Where do these conversations typically stall? What resistance shows up most often?
- The intended next step – What commitment is realistic for this meeting type?
When these elements are predefined, preparation stops being a creative strain and becomes execution discipline.
Consistency scales. Reinvention drains.
And in an environment where B2B buyers are already overwhelmed—Gartner reports that buyers spend only 17% of their time meeting with sellers²—you cannot afford drift.
Where the Real Effort Actually Belongs
Here’s the counterintuitive part. The only thing that should meaningfully change meeting to meeting is the research.
- What’s new with this advisor?
- What’s changed since the last conversation?
- What context matters right now?
That’s it.
Research personalizes. Structure stabilizes.
When everything feels like “prep,” nothing is focused.
But when structure is fixed, and research is the variable, preparation becomes faster—and more effective.
This matters because sales complexity isn’t decreasing. McKinsey notes that sales organizations are navigating more stakeholders, more scrutiny, and longer cycles than ever³. Meanwhile, buyers expect insight, not information, and research shows top-performing sellers are significantly more likely to lead with new ideas and perspectives⁴.
You can’t do that if you’re reinventing the meeting every time.
When meetings are easy to get, inefficiency hides. When meetings are hard to earn, it shows up immediately.
Calls drift, conversations stay polite, and nothing advances.
The teams that win aren’t preparing more. They’re preparing smarter. They master a small number of high-impact, repeatable conversations—then refine them relentlessly.
Preparation becomes a system. Not a scramble.
The Leadership Opportunity
For sales leaders, this is significant. If meetings repeat, preparation can be:
- Standardized without scripting
- Coached without micromanaging
- Inspected without subjectivity
Preparation stops being personal preference and becomes a shared operating rhythm.
And that’s when consistency compounds.
In high-performing sales organizations, excellence isn’t improvisation.
It’s repeatable.
Sales leaders: comment “PREP” and we’ll share the preparation template we use to help teams simplify prep, tighten execution, and stop reinventing the same meetings over and over.
At Optimé International, we work with many of the world’s leading sales organizations, big and small, helping them achieve and exceed their performance goals. If you would like to learn more about our passion for the sales profession and to make a difference, we’d love to chat with you, maybe over a coffee, virtual or IRL! Click here: Connect with Optimé for a coffee!
Footnotes & References
- Gartner, “The New B2B Buying Journey” — Research showing suppliers get only 17% of total buying group time.
- McKinsey & Company, “The new B2B growth equation” — On increasing complexity and multi-stakeholder buying dynamics.
- RAIN Group, “Top Performance in Sales Research Report” — On insight-led selling and behaviors of top-performing sellers.
