This was shared by a connection on LinkedIn – enjoy!
Archive for the ‘how to have productive sales team meetings’ Category
More Great Meeting Advice for Leaders
Monday, August 9th, 2010Create Better Buying Experiences (Free Sales Team Meeting Agenda Included)
Saturday, July 24th, 2010Stop for a moment and think about the experience your customers have purchasing from you and your company. Do you make it easy and enjoyable or does the work just begin when they say “yes”. The Meeting to Win agenda that went out on Friday is Creating Better Buying Experiences and it leads sales teams through exercises to eliminate bad experiences and create better experiences. We think so often about selling that sometimes we don’t stop to think about what it’s like to buy.
I was sitting with my colleague while she was booking hotel rooms for our team for an upcoming trip. The website she was using limited her to two reservations and she needed three. To get three, you had to call. Well, we were in an office building with poor cell reception and limited time so, what did she do? She went to our second choice and booked three $400/night hotel rooms at the competition. The first choice will never know they missed out on that business, but one buying experience cost them $2,000 that week.
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes by calling your own customer service, reviewing invoices, visiting your website and ordering your own products and services. Talk to customers about each interaction they have with your company to learn where they experience frustrations. Get your marketing team in on the project. If you can improve the customer’s buying experience, you can increase sales.
FREE Sales Team Meeting Idea:
As a team, walk through the exercises in this complimentary sales team meeting agenda, Creating Better Buying Experiences. To get agendas like this every week, simply join other successful Sales Managers and subscribe to Meeting to Win.
Meetings That Rock by Paul Castain, Pt 2
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 
Here is a link to the FREE e-book Paul promised and delivered. Enjoy! Thanks to Paul for mentioning Meeting to Win as a helpful resource for sales managers looking to have “meetings that rock“.
Sales Meetings that Rock by Paul Castain of Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010It’s one of my goals to share great sales meeting ideas and resources with Sales & The City readers. In pursuit of that goal, I point you to Paul Castain’s two-part series, Sales Meetings That Rock.
Check it out here.
13 Ideas to Run Engaging Meetings from Salesopedia Written by Nicki Weiss
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010I always love to share great meeting advice I come across in my reading. Here is some sound advice from Salesopedia’s newsletter this week.
13 Ideas to Run Engaging Meetings
Enjoy!
It’s Time To Invite a Guest Speaker to Your Sales Meeting
Monday, May 17th, 2010Each quarter, Meeting to Win encourages our subscribers to invite a Guest Speaker to their weekly sales team meeting. We’ve updated the list we published in February with more ideas on Guest Speaker options. Invite a Guest Speaker to your next sales meeting and see your team light up.
Wake Up Monday Sales Meetings with Guest Speakers
Subscribe to Meeting to Win weekly sales team meeting agendas and enjoy upcoming topics such as:
Price vs. Value, Deal Makers (Series), Masters of Communication, 13 Critical Success Factors for Salespeople (Series) and many others to keep your team fired up, equipped and winning all year long.
Sales Team Meeting Idea – Sales Performance Book Club
Saturday, May 1st, 2010We at Meeting to Win are on a mission to end boring sales team meetings. Boring sales team meetings put sales teams to sleep right at the beginning of the selling week when they should be at their very best. The last thing salespeople should have to do is recover from their sales team meeting so they can be productive each Monday. As part of our mission, we want to share a sales team meeting idea for Sales Managers who share our passion.
Sales Team Meeting Idea – Sales Performance Book Clubs
As a team,
Choose a business or sales book from Amazon.com (choose your own or subscribe to Meeting to Win and follow along with our quarterly Sales Performance Book Club – includes Discussion Guide and Chapter Exercises). Cover one or two new chapters each week during your weekly sales team meeting. Assign the chapters to the members of the team. Each week give them 20 minutes of the agenda to lead the team on that chapter’s topic.
They can:
- Lead a discussion on the information in the chapter.
- Ask the team to apply the lessons to their own business.
- Practice skills or ideas from the chapter.
- Pull one or two key lessons from the chapter.
- Set one action item based on the work done during this meeting.
- Get creative – give them the chance to do whatever they want with the chapter. You’ll see a new side of some team members.
Meeting to Win provides Sales Performance Book Club discussions each quarter as part of our Sales Meeting Agenda Subscription. We cover one new book each quarter. Next one, Mind of the Customer, starts in April 2010. Join us by subscribing today.
Join the MISSION TO END BAD SALES TEAM MEETINGS by having motivating sales team meetings that inspire your team to perform. Everyone wins!
Post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Owner of Meeting to Win. Meeting to Win provides Sales Team Meeting Agendas PLUS for Sales Managers who want to lead great sales team meetings.
Get Hitched
Sunday, April 25th, 2010Your products and services – or solutions – meet very important needs of your customers. The more your solutions directly impact their ability to do their business more effectively, the more powerful and important your partnership becomes. Salespeople can hitch their solutions to the most important wagons with a little focus on the right needs.
No matter who you are positioned with in an account, an understanding of the top company goals is useful in the short term and often critical in the long term. In the short term, simply offering a solution they are asking for may be enough to make a sale at a department level. In the long term, much like what we have seen in the past couple of years, spending gets scrutized for one reason or another and any spending not directly tied to the most important goals gets cancelled. Also, salespeople often find themselves in the position of being sold internally by an ally or coach. They have to provide the information and incentive to get their internal ally to fight for their solutions. If that person is armed with the connection to the top goals, the more likely they are to be successful in their interal sales role.
So, we know it’s important, now, how do you do it. Here are some things that you may want to try:
- First of all, start high in an organization. The more effectively you can tie your solutions to their unique company goals, the more likely you are to stay high. Even if you get delegated lower during the process, you still have access higher.
- Research, research, research. Find out everything you can about what the CEO is focused on accomplishing.
- Find out what role your contacts play in the top company goals. For example, pretend your contact is in HR and one of the company’s top goals is the successful launch of a new product for 8% revenue growth this year. How will HR help the company reach this goal? Is it their job to find new sales people? Is it their job to train everyone on the new product? What particular part will they play in this goal? Once you know this you can help them reach their goal which helps the company reach it’s goal.
- Demonstrate how you can help them reach these goals more efficiently. Show how the investment with you gives them the gains they need.
- Once you are in, monitor your contribution and share it in regular reports and communications. Check in often on progress and make sure you stay aligned should the goals get altered.
- Learn to ask questions that get you to the most important goals. You’ll be surprised that often your current contacts actually don’t even know the company’s top goals. You need to learn to ask questions that don’t make them feel stupid yet also help you work toward gathering the necessary information. Simply asking someone “what are your company’s top 3 goals?” may sound like a pop quiz. Use your communication skills to have productive conversations where you both learn if necessary.
Solutions tied to top goals stand the test of time and scrutiny. Get hitched to the right goals for long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.
Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting agendas for Sales Managers. This week’s agenda is Tie Your Solutions to Their Goals. If you would like to lead your team through exercises designed to help them “get hitched”, subscribe today.
4 Steps to Creating Powerful, Effective Sales Meetings by Paul McCord (Link to Salesopedia)
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010I received this article today from my Salesopedia subscription. Two terrifying truths jumped out at me immediately.
- “Weekly sales meetings have killed more manager authority and respect than probably any other activity a manager engages in with the possible exception of the ride along.”
- “They have also driven a great number of high performers to the competition, one of which may be my client Richard who is one of the top 5 sellers in his company’s 300 member sales force.”
Read more about the importance of executing effective sales team meetings in Paul McCord’s article,
4 Steps to Creating Powerful, Effective Sales Meetings.
Enjoy Paul’s insights and direction and start having better meetings this Monday. It is critically important.
17 Best Practices of Top Performers by Kelley Robertson
Sunday, April 11th, 2010This week’s Meeting to Win sales team meeting agenda is called Best Practices of Top Performing Sales People. We highlight Kelley’s article as a starting point for sales teams to create their own list and close the gap between their own performance and that of the very top performers in their own organizations. Enjoy the article. To get the agenda, subscribe to Meeting to Win now.
17 Best Practices of Top Performing Sales People by KelleyRobertson
Many people wonder what separates a top performing sales person from the rest of the pack. In most cases, it’s because they apply a number of best practices in their daily routine. Here are 17 best practices of top performing sales people.
