Sales and Marketing Channel Management- Sales Meeting

 SALES MEETING

Sales meetings are essential for any sales operation. But too often they are seen more as a necessary evil than an opportunity to improve.

By effectively planning each meeting and motivating your sales teams, your meetings will be more productive. Your reps will be excited and ready to contribute to your sales meetings as a result.

In this definitive guide, you’ll learn exactly how to plan and prepare meetings that drive strategic results. Using sales meetings, we’ll show you how to:

 

·         Motivate your team

·         Yield productive insights

·         Generate new ideas

·         Get your reps to contribute to your sales process

·         Improve your sales forecasting

Table of contents:

Part 1: Planning and preparing effective sales meeting agendas

Part 2: How to motivate and energize your team

Part 3: Generating strategic value from sales reps

Part 4: The anatomy of weekly and bi-weekly meetings

Bonus: Three sales meeting ideas

You can also watch our video series on setting up a sales meeting agenda that motivates your team and improves productivity.

 

Part 1: Planning and preparing effective sales meeting agendas

Before you plan your meeting, ask yourself, “Do I even need one in the first place?”

If you can resolve issues, gather information or answer questions in less than 10 minutes, you probably don’t need to hold a meeting. Instead, ask the salesperson (or people) you need to speak with if they have time for a quick chat.

Mark Hunter of The Sales Hunter shines a light on one particular motivator behind unnecessary sales meetings:

 

“There are too many weekly sales meetings that are nothing more than a way for a sales manager to check something off their task list. If this is the motivation behind the meeting, I’d bet my last dollar that the meeting is NOT helpful to the people in it.”

As a result, you waste everyone’s time and lose respect from your reps. Avoid these types of meetings at all costs.

Assuming you’ve conducted this “sanity check,” you can go ahead and prepare for your sales meeting.

The lessons in this guide apply to weekly meetings as well as one-off sessions. We’ll share ideas for the latter at the end.

 

Four elements of a successful sales meeting

Inefficient meetings can be costly to sales performance, as well as overall business value.

In fact, Fortune magazine did the maths on just how costly it can be:

“Start with a company that has 20,000 salaried employees, many of them highly skilled. Then figure that their average total compensation per person is $100,000 annually. Let’s say each one spends a very conservative 15% of his or her time every year in unproductive meetings. Total annual cost to the company of the time lost: $300 million.”

It can be easy to fall into the trap of meaningless meetings. Too often the reason is simply “that’s how we do things.”

Harvard Business Review recently ran a survey, asking 182 senior managers across a range of industries whether they found their meetings productive.

·         65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work

·         71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient

·         64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking

·         62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together

Don’t get me wrong, meetings are still necessary for sales teams, but that doesn’t mean they have to be fruitless.

When putting together meaningful meetings, follow these principles:

Use standardized agendas. Don’t reinvent the wheel for every meeting. Create “recurring” agendas and use these as templates.

 

Provide value. Every meeting should give your team value. In other words, provide them with something they can use to close more deals. This can be something as basic as training or even feedback from customers.

Team participation. Reps will get bored if you don’t get them involved. Generate “buy-in” by setting expectations before the meeting. Encourage interaction throughout the meeting with Q&As and brainstorm sessions.

Be consistent. Speaking of expectations, make sure recurring meetings are always held on the same day of the month or week, and time of the day. This will build a rhythm that sets expectations for your team members.

This might seem overwhelming, especially when finding new ways to motivate your team. Which is why having a consistent agenda will make life easier.

 

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