For some companies, the meeting is a discussion of the previous week's sales results and planning efforts for the current week.
For others, it’s a session of excuses, accusations, or complaints, where all departments end up passing the buck. Suddenly, the hour-long meeting takes twice as long, with nothing accomplished. In fact, the team leaves the meeting in lower morale than when it started. It’s hardly a winning formula.
If you repeat the exercise every week, the negative spiral will set in and staff will dread sales meetings.
What are sales meetings for?
To be successful, businesses need data and information, which your sales force has since they interact with your customers every day. Feedback from this team is essential to taking action to improve your business.
In other words, the sales meeting provides a regular touchpoint with revenue-generating personnel to identify pipeline opportunities and risks facing the business (i.e., competition, pricing, awareness, etc.).
How to lead an effective sales meeting?
Structure should be the foundation of any sales meeting. It should never be an open-ended, catch-up meeting. It should have an agenda with time limits and boundaries to allow the team to give and receive the most information and value possible for the time allotted. Over time, formalizing and institutionalizing the meeting will maximize the performance of your sales team.
There’s an anti-meeting movement in today’s business world. Yet, in my opinion, the sales meeting is critical to transmitting information from the field to management. It’s also an opportunity to mitigate risk by proactively gathering and sharing information.
So how can you avoid the minefield that can turn your meeting into a complete waste of time? What should a sales meeting look like? Establish a structure and stick to it! This is your job as the leader of the company.
Prepare a standing agenda
Every sales meeting should have the same agenda, allowing your team to get into a rhythm over time. Here's what it might look like:
Sample Sales Meeting Agenda
Meeting starts at 9am, regardless of attendance
Business to be done: Review opportunities and new developments regarding the customer base
10 minutes
New weekly sales
10 minutes
Review of key performance indicators (KPIs)
10 minutes
Marketing News: Planned Activities for Lead Generation in the Market
10 minutes
Training and Product Development Update
5 minutes
Trial and error: The biggest challenge of the last week.
What works well? What doesn't work?
10 minutes
Recognition Moment: Recognize someone's efforts over the past week.
5 minutes
The meeting ends at 10 a.m.
For each step of the meeting, you must respect the physician database allotted time. Designate a secretary to take notes during the meeting. Then, clearly indicate that you will not exceed the allotted time.
What topics should be covered?
Each participant should know what topics will be covered and what to prepare for their presentation. The information should be able to be communicated to all team members. This is primarily information that management needs to hear, with action items that they need to consider, such as:
training related issues
product challenges
competitive intelligence
questions raised by customers
planning related to illness or vacation
If you do this every week, you'll be less likely to encounter surprises.
What to do if a hot issue comes up during the meeting?
It's inevitable that there's always a topic that eats up a lot of time. A problem with a client, a performance issue, or a popular topic that could derail the meeting.
Address the issue after the meeting
We need to respect each person's time as well as the purpose of the meeting, which is to get the sales team on the same page.
As a leader, you also need to keep your team motivated and create an environment that is conducive to sales. These sales meetings are a key part of this. They are the perfect place to show your team members their worth. I always come back to the adage: “praise in public, criticize in private.”
For larger organizational issues, you can hold a separate monthly sales meeting where larger systemic issues are discussed with the group.
What happens after these meetings?
Follow up with people who had something to say but didn't get a chance. Do this in person, not via email.
Ask the person who is designated as secretary to circulate notes and action items with deadlines. Since you will be holding these meetings weekly, someone should follow up on the discussions.
Effective sales meetings: what are they for?
Sales meetings are important touchpoints for the sales team. They should not be impromptu. If you do it right, everyone will walk away from the meeting with a lesson learned.
Benefits of dedication and diligence to these meetings:
Learn something new every week
Teach your team something new every week
Motivating your sales team
Keeping Your Sales Team Engaged in Your Business
Are you holding weekly sales meetings? We’d love to hear what makes them effective or why you’re struggling. If you’re not holding weekly sales meetings, we hope this post gives you the motivation to start… starting Monday.
