If Your Sales Meeting’s Important, Have a Plan
Having a sales meeting means bringing your salespeople out of the field. No client visits, no prospecting, and no revenue. This means your sales meetings can either be a tremendous waste of time, or an opportunity for outstanding return on the investment of time everyone has made. It’s up to you.
To make sure you hit the mark, it’s a good idea to have a standard format for your sales meetings. This allows everyone to know what to expect. A key consideration here is how long your sales meetings will be. Generally, 45 minutes to an hour is sufficient. You don’t want to lose your audience, and sticking to a schedule helps insure you don’t wasting time with your sales meetings. If you do have a sales meeting that will last longer than an hour, provide a break so it is easier for you and your audience to get full value from the session.
It’s vital to have a well-planned agenda for your sales meetings. Your meeting agenda may have the following components:
- Sales Meeting Introduction: Welcome everyone to the sales meeting and review the agenda. You can usually set aside five minutes for this.
- Company announcements: Take time to let the team know about the company’s recent accomplishments, and maybe to recognize someone outside the sales department who contributed in a special way to the sales effort. This should also be about five minutes.
- Recognition of major accomplishments within the sales department: This could be new accounts won, new connections made, or any special accomplishments achieved since the last meeting, and should take about another five minutes.
- Primary sales meeting presentation: As the meat of the meeting, this section should last approximately 30 minutes. Again, if it goes over that significantly, allow for a break about halfway through.
- Question and answer time. Once the presentation for your major topic is complete, set aside 10 minutes for Q&A. This allows everyone to ask questions and gain a better understanding of the subject matter. Sometimes, people may not want to ask questions because they don’t want to sound like they don’t understand. To help with this, it’s a good idea to ask your senior people to pre-plan questions to get the ball rolling.
- The Sales Meeting Conclusion: Take this time to reinforce key take-aways. Always end the meeting on a positive note, so when your salespeople go out to meet with clients, they are up and ready to make something happen. Again, five minutes should be plenty.
Sales Meeting Etiquette
The last thing I want to mention is sales meeting etiquette. By following etiquette, you’re showing the value you as a leader put on the sales meetings.
- Post the meeting agenda on the board each week and send it to all attendees.
- Start every sales meeting on time. If your meeting is to start at 7:30 a.m., then that’s when it starts. It doesn’t matter if the room is empty. Always start on time. People will eventually get the message and make sure they are in their seats. One of my daughters went to the Air Force Academy. She told me that at the Academy, if someone wasn’t in their seat five minutes before the appointed time, they were late.
- As the meeting leader, you should always be early. If something comes up and you know you will not be there, make sure you have a proxy to stand in your place and get the meeting started on time and running on schedule.
- Speaking of the schedule, stay on it. I know there’s always a tendency to run a little longer when the topic starts to get going, but harness this in as best you can. Consistently going over sends the wrong message. Your salespeople have something to do as soon as the meeting is over, like maybe a sales call. Keep the schedule to help them see through your leadership the value of time and money.
In my early days as a sales manager, I would hold weekly sales meetings just because that’s what we did. Now I see them as an opportunity to deliver information the sales team will see value in, as well as a chance to coach and develop talent, and to pump up the sales team each week so they are ready to influence new customers, close more sales, and deliver strong results.
The key is to go into each meeting with an agenda and a goal. Having an agenda will help you accomplish your goal while adding value and not simply wasting everyone’s time.
Ask your questions or share your feedback:
- Comment on the this post
- Subscribe to our Newsletter To receive additional information
- Email @SalesManagementWorkshop.com
Let’s connect:
- If you have a chance, please leave me an honest rating and review in iTunes. It will help the show and its ranking. I appreciate it !!!! Thanks and I hope you enjoyed the show!
- Join the Facebook Page
- Follow @mcsalesworkshop