Most salespeople view sales meetings as a waste of their time and in many cases they are right. And if you waste a salesperson’s time, you are not only damaging your company’s bottom-line, you are wasting a valuable opportunity to improve it.
So what can you do to be sure that you run productive sales meetings:
1. Define a Clear Purpose
If you don’t know what the meeting is for, how can anyone else. Have a clear, detailed agenda that focuses on the SSS principle:
- Solving: with everyone in one place you have a tremendous opportunity to use combined experience and intellect to solve problems. Don’t take over; there’s nothing worse than a meeting where one person monopolises the conversation – it’s ineffective, irritating and will alienate your team.
- Sharing: ultimately, you want each salesperson to perform as well as they can. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is knowledge and resource sharing. It is part of fostering a team culture that will ultimately increase the success of your organisation.
Create space for people to talk about their successes and failures in an open, encouraging environment. Remember, failure is as valid as success in this arena – don’t admonish salespeople who’ve made mistakes. Being able to share these mistakes openly helps your organisation to avoid them in the future and ultimately drives achievement.
- Skills: Again, it’s all about collaboration and shared experience. Use role-play and discussion to address known areas of difficulty or weakness; you can use the same approach to help salespeople feel comfortable with new products or markets too. Don’t admonish or embarrass – avoid focusing on particular individuals – or your efforts at development will seem punitive.
2. Create Ownership and Accountability…Positively
Have a dedicated laptop, with a projector, on which you record agreed objectives throughout the meeting. Everyone can see the list as it develops and you can quickly email it to the delegates or post it on the intranet. Make these objectives the starting point for your next meeting.
By doing this you help to create a culture of continual improvement, with individuals having ownership of objectives, because they helped to define the list, and being accountable to colleagues for actioning list items.
3. Focused, Protected Time
It sounds obvious, but I have sat through so many interrupted sales meetings. On a similar note, I have even seen a sales manager duck out of a personal review session – leaving a member of his team in tears having just announced the loss of a loved one – to take a call from a client!
Sales meeting time is sacred. No mobiles, Blackberry devices, iPhones or anything else. All electronic devices (except your presentation equipment!) turned off; all staff instructed to avoid interruption unless the building is on fire!
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