Sales Managers, do your sales team meetings have “snooze” as the main agenda topic?  It’s not as easy as it looks to plan and execute interesting, interactive sales team meetings.  At Meeting to Win, we believe these meetings should equip your team to compete and win.  If yours aren’t doing that, continue reading….

(At the end of this post, Sales Managers can download a FREE  ”Kick-Off to Great Sales Team Meetings” Workshop Guide.  The guide will help you lead your team through the planning of great sales team meetings as outlined in this article.  Take “SNOOZE” off your agenda!)

To begin having GREAT weekly sales team meetings, don’t try to do it all yourself.  Involve your bright team in the planning and executing.  After all, when done correctly, aren’t they the ones who are supposed to benefit from this time?  If so, they need to own responsibility, also. 

Let’s get started.  Carve out some time to work on your sales team meeting plan WITH your team.  We suggest doing this during your…. you guessed it, weekly sales team meeting.

Before this meeting, consult with some of your team’s natural leaders.  Ask them about the current sales team meetings and how they would improve them.  Let them know you plan to consult with the team on the topic and ask them to take leadership roles in that meeting.  The outcome should be a plan to have more effective sales team meetings that the entire team builds and then executes consistently.

During the meeting, welcome the team and thank them for their time.  Review your plan for the meeting and share the reasons you want to put appropriate effort into improving sales team meetings.  Ask your leaders you consulted with in advance to share their thoughts, also.

Now, it’s time to get to work.

Set a goal for this meeting.  As a team, what do you hope to gain from spending time on this topic?  At the end of the meeting, determine if you achieved that outcome.

For fun, ask each meeting participant to share their best and worst sales team meeting experiences.  Ask them what made those experiences the best and worst.  You’ll have a good starting point on how to move forward.

A very important next step is to set some meeting ground rules.  As a team, create a list of rules everyone should abide by.  We’ve seen the ground rules include (1) be on time, (2) no agenda hi-jacking, (3) everyone problem needs to be introduced with possible solutions and so on.  It is important that this list of ground rules be created and agreed upon by the team, not just the manager.

Now, what should you talk about? Content is critically important for a great sales team meeting.  The content you choose will determine how effective the meeting will meet the objective of equipping the team to compete and win.  Ask the team to share a list of topics they’d like to cover.  Now, figure out where to find information on these topics – guest speakers, books, product specialists, company sales trainer, industry magazines, websites, etc.  These topics will be what you use to build your weekly sales team meeting agendas.  (Meeting to Win provides Sales Managers with new topics and agendas every week!  To subscribe, visit us at Meeting to Win or visit our store at M2W Store.)

Next, as a team, create your next 4 agendas.  Ask different team members to gather topic information and lead sections of the meetings.  Everyone owns parts of the meeting which distributes the work and makes for much more interesting meetings.

Finally, set your team up for a bright sales team meeting future.  It takes effort and its worth it.  As a team, determine how the group will commit to executing productive sales team meetings moving forward.  You’ve done the hard part and planned it. Now, you need to execute.  Maybe each team member can own one month of the year or you can create a sales team meeting task force. Whatever works for your team, plan it and commit to it before you close this topic.

You have the blueprint for moving forward with GREAT sales team meetings.  Get the FREE  ”Kick-Off to Great Sales Team Meetings” Workshop Guide and get started NOW!

Post brought to you by Jill Myrick, Founder of Meeting to Win.  Meeting to Win provides sales team meeting resources such as topics, agendas, e-books and consulting.