Creating A More Productive Sales Meeting
Sales meetings are important to communicate with and motivate your team. However, inefficiency and wasted activities create a negative perception of them within your organisation.
To help your reps view meetings as essential to their success, consider the following tips for increasing the productivity of your sales meetings.
Maintain a Central Focus
Regular gatherings where you present a laundry list of items do not produce fruitful results. Instead, your people leave feeling overwhelmed by the plethora of disjointed information.
Keep your meetings concentrated on one topic or at least a very small number of them. In addition to information, use your team meetings to offer tangible examples or demonstrations that allow your key points to resonate with reps.
Keep Them Short
You don’t have to meet for an hour for a sales meeting to be effective. In fact, reps typically prefer a 15- or 30-minute sales meeting that is impactful and efficiently run. By keeping your gatherings brief, you guard against reps dreading them.
Provide an Agenda
Let your team know in advance and again at the start of the meeting, what you plan to accomplish. Stick to the scheduled time frame and agenda. Avoid the tendency to allow the conversation to drift into tangential or unrelated topics.
Include timing elements within your agenda outline. Doing so helps you stay on-point as you present information or cover particular items.
Motivate Through Praise
Top sales reps are ego-driven. They like to receive praise and recognition for a job well done, particularly in a public setting. A team meeting is an excellent opportunity to call attention to reps who have achieved success in activities carried out since the last meeting or in their overall results.
If your entire team has hit a key target or is on pace to achieve a strong performance in the month, quarter or year, you could use a portion of your meeting to celebrate. These types of recognition contribute to the evolution of a positive work culture and job satisfaction for your people.
Establish a Clear Outcome
The most important key to a productive meeting is the buy-in from your reps. Thus, communicate a clear outcome to indicate how the sales meeting will improve the team or individual performance. When reps understand the correlation between the meeting purpose and sales objectives, buy-in is more likely to occur.
Close with Action Steps
If your sales meetings consist of little more than information dissemination, it is hard to generate much improvement in productivity. Always close by identifying next steps or desired actions resulting from the items covered.
If a meeting addresses software adoption or technology tools, for instance, actions steps might include near-term training, accountability for participation and coaching reviews.
Wrap Up
A productive sales meeting results from a clear plan, concise topics, efficient use of time and action steps. A consistent approach helps your team recognise the value of meetings in the overall scheme of the company and efforts to optimise performance.
