Whether you plan a weekly sales meeting in the office or have a hand in creating the agenda for the annual, multiple-day offsite, you understand the challenge of keeping participants engaged and making meetings matter. No surprise, there is no shortage of advice in this area.
Some of the ideas are innovative and worth trying, others, not so much. Here’s a collection of solid tips that we rounded up:
TLA
That’s an acronym for Think Like the Audience! Don’t think like a sales manager. Think like the people in the seats, says Joel Weldon (JoelWeldon.blogspot.com). Management sees the big picture and thinks long term. Salespeople think, “What can I do today to make a sale?”
One client had me attend their sales meeting prior to helping them improve. It was shocking to watch their CEO spend 27 minutes explaining the challenges of a pending IPO scheduled for five months down the road, and then the intricacies of the stock price, and then close with his passionate plea to cut back on their expense accounts. It was shocking because the 287 salespeople in this company didn’t have stock options! An IPO was about as important to them as the weather forecast for five months down the road. And “expense account cutting” is the euphemism salespeople interpret as “cut back on spending to build relationships with your best customers and prospects.”
Now do the math. Twenty-seven minutes on the 4-hour agenda. Not that much, right? Hold on. You have to look at those 27 minutes times 287 salespeople! Now you have 7,749 minutes or 129 hours of potential selling time. Wow, that’s a lot of wasted time! Next time you put an item on your agenda, multiply it by the number of people in the seats, and ask yourself this one simple question: “Will this help these people increase their sales?”
Get a jump on the meeting
If you’re going to cover new training material in the sales meeting, be sure to send some, if not all of it to your reps ahead of time, says author and consultant John Treace (TreaceConsulting.com). Encourage reps to look at the material before they arrive to speed up the learning process and allow you to focus on the more advanced areas of the training in the meeting. You could even give a short quiz at the beginning of the meeting to find out who did the homework and who didn’t. The results will tell you who’s committed to the business — and who isn’t.
Start at the ending
When you begin planning your next sales meeting, start with the end of your meeting in mind. Imagine at the end of your national sales meeting several interns will ask each of your salespeople, as they’re leaving the meeting, to describe in detail what they specifically took away from the meeting. How would you want your salespeople to respond? Your answer becomes your meeting objective(s), says sales trainer Jim Meisenheimer (meisenheimer.com). By focusing on the end of the meeting and the outcomes you want to achieve, your planning sessions will become more effective and your meetings will be even more productive and more profitable for your organization.
