If sales meetings feel more like necessary evils than productive meetings of the mind, you may have an issue with management. It is up to you to breathe new life into your weekly sales meetings. It is possible to get more from your meetings and make them more enjoyable for your team. All it takes is a little advice on how to run a meeting, and a few top-shelf sales meeting ideas. Use these tips to achieve more effective sales meetings at your enterprise.
Prepare Talking Points
As a sales meeting leader, it is your job to use the allotted time wisely. One of the most time-consuming issues many meetings encounter is lack of direction. Without clear leadership for the meeting on your part, your salespeople will lose focus and the whole meeting may run off track. This means more wasted time calling your team to order and figuring out what to discuss next. Preparation is key for a strong, productive sales meeting.
Create an agenda to make the most of your meeting time. Your agenda should be as detailed as possible, creating a step-by-step guideline you can use to walk your team through the meeting. The more you prepare for a meeting, the easier it will be to stick to your most important talking points. Prioritize your agenda in order from most important to least important. That way, if you run out of time, your team will at least have gotten the most critical points you needed to make.
Send a copy of the agenda to all reps who will be attending. That way, your salespeople can peruse the items on the list, prepare questions ahead of time, and be ready to dive right into the topics when they arrive in the conference room. This can eliminate wasted time reading over lists during the actual meeting, as well as give your team more time to come up with value-driven questions.
Ask the Right Questions
Productive sales meetings ask the right questions. The goal of a sales meeting is to answer important questions, come up with new marketing ideas, and to increase sales in the future. Write down a list of questions prior to the meeting so you can come prepared. Before you plan your meeting, ask yourself questions such as:
- What is the purpose of this meeting?
- What challenges are we facing today?
- How long will this meeting need to last?
- Who is in charge?
- What actions do we need to take next?
Answering these questions will give your meeting greater direction and purpose. Once you have the answers to these questions, you can start giving your sales meeting agenda shape. The amount of time you’ll have, for example, can dictate how many topics you’ll have time to sufficiently cover.
Focus on One Key Issue
Another common problem with sales meetings is an overambitious leader. You may have a long list of things you wish to discuss with your team, but laying them all out at once might not be the most efficient way to run a meeting. Tackling too many talking points results in the inability to dive into the most important issues. Instead of covering more ground, you’ll really be taking a step backward.
Your meeting will run smoother and be more productive if you control the agenda by choosing one main item to discuss per meeting. This is why weekly sales meetings are often necessary – to cover a wider range of topics without stuffing too many discussions into a single conference. Your team will benefit from the ability to review one topic in-depth, with ample time to take notes and ask questions, more than several topics briefly discussed.
Think About Your Team’s Interests
The most effective sales meetings are the ones in which everyone feels encouraged to contribute to the conversation. Sharing ideas and bouncing ideas off one another can help you keep everyone engaged and review a topic more thoroughly. Generate a steady stream of sales ideas during a meeting with a bit of motivation:
- Give incentives for good ideas
- Build a more creative meeting environment
- Be transparent with business goals
- Ask your team questions and listen to their answers
- Encourage “no bad questions” and mistakes
- Provide positive reinforcement for idea-makers
Making your sales meeting more relevant for the reps attending can spark innovations, motivate salespeople to do better, build better workplace culture, and keep everyone on the same page for the duration of the meeting. It can show your reps you appreciate their hard work and loyalty, and make them want to show you the same kind of respect during meetings.
Start on a Positive Note
Most salespeople do not look forward to sales meetings. Yet if they know there is a chance a higher-up will recognize them for outstanding performance that week, they may have more of a reason to anticipate a meeting in a positive light. Start each sales meeting by recognizing performance. Consider giving incentives to top performers during each meeting. Put it at the start of the meeting to begin on a positive note, and to make sure you always have time to get to it. This can help your team look forward to attending each week.
Stick to Your Time Frame
Never host an open-ended sales meeting. This not only can allow your meeting to run on for an indeterminate amount of time, but it can also make your salespeople dread future meetings, since they do not know how long they may last. Your reps will benefit from having some expectation of meeting timeline and structure. Decide how long your sales meeting will last and stick to this time frame as much as you can.
Announce to your salespeople the exact start and finish times of your sales meeting. That way, they will know exactly how much time they will have to discuss a topic and ask their questions. A strict deadline to finish the meeting can create healthy pressure for everyone to focus, stay on topic, and use the time wisely. It can also help eliminate dawdling, chatting, and getting off-topic for an overall more productive meeting.
Come Away With Specific Action Steps
One of the most important aspects of any great sales meeting is how it will shape the future of the company. Sales meetings should not only review past performance and check in on where salespeople are now – it should set them up for success post-meeting. As the leader of a sales meeting, make sure to come away with specific action steps and a timeline for completing them. You should at least have the next step to continue moving the process forward. The next step may include:
- Sending follow-up emails or calls to prospects
- Initiating a new idea for better sales
- Writing or rehearsing sales scripts
- Developing new sales skills
- Scheduling sales training sessions
Give your sales reps a clear next step post-meeting, for better direction and a more productive workplace. Show your reps that sales meetings are more than just a monotonous necessity, but a way to motivate real change and improvements in marketing. Giving actionable steps and advice for what to do after a meeting can give your employees a purpose and boost productivity.
Revisit Sales Training
Curious about how to make your sales meetings even more effective? Invest in corporate sales training for fresh sales meeting ideas, total meeting overhauls, or coaching on how to run a meeting. Sales meetings can make a real difference for your organization. Contact us for more information about sales training today. Your team – and your bottom line – will thank you.
