A good friend of Meeting to Win, S. Anthony Iannarino, wrote a great article on my favorite topic – Sales Meetings.  I put a link to the article below – enjoy!

How to Make the Most of Sales Meetings

by S. Anthony Iannarino

Sales meetings, despite their sometimes less-than-flattering reputations, are necessary to effectively running a sales organization. Are we sometimes guilty of holding too many meetings? Yes, we are. Are we equally guilty of the occasional meeting with no disciplined agenda? Yes, sometimes they are a complete and total waste of your time.

But they don’t have to be a waste of time.

Read the rest…

For help creating productive sales team meeting environments, download the FREE Kick-Off to Great Sales Team Meetings Workshop Guide.

Thanks to FSI for such a great event, Making Sales Meetings Count.

Jill Myrick was our special guest in Friday’s Office Hours. Our discussion was on how to hold high impact sales meetings. (Based on her module: Great Sales Team Meetings, 5 Best Practices.) She kicked the discussion off with a review of the five best practices:

1.Sharing ownership across the team
2.Setting agendas
3.Resisting data dumps
4.Respecting the clock
5.Scoring meetings

The participants shared experiences about good and bad sales meetings—and ideas to avoid bad sales meetings. There were several key areas generating a lot of discussion. The first … Read the rest at Future Selling Institute…

Meeting to Win Sales Team Meeting Topics available for purchase and immediate DOWNLOAD at the Meeting to Win Store. 

You may download the Meeting To Win Sales Team Meeting Topics-To-Win Catalog.  This was updated in January 2011 and is a list of 90+ sales team meeting topics available for immediate download on the Meeting to Win Store.

We currently offer 90+ sales team meeting topics across 21 different selling categories.  Each topic can take 20-50 minutes to execute depending on how you want to use it.

Enjoy interactive, interesting and inspiring sales team meetings with Meeting to Win Sales Team Meeting Topics.

Happy Selling,

Jill Myrick

Owner, Meeting to Win

jill@meetingtowin.com

www.meetingtowin.com

Are your sales team meetings painful? Do you feel this pressure to entertain and energize your sales team every Monday morning only to leave feeling disappointed and awkward? You are not alone…

(Get a NEW sales team meeting topic EVERY Friday morning delivered right to your inbox – Subscribe to Meeting to Win by clicking HERE.)

Sales team meetings call into play skill sets and abilities such as facilitation, showmanship, conflict resolution, public speaking, communication skills and likability. There are people who make a living specializing in just one of those skill sets. So, it’s no wonder it’s challenging to execute productive and inspiring sales team meetings week after week.

I have the solution for you.

Quit trying to do it yourself.

Sales team members didn’t buy a ticket to your show. Therefore, they need to stop showing up on Monday mornings with the attitude of an audience waiting to get their money’s worth.

The sales team meeting is for the benefit of the sales team, not the sales manager. It is time to invite your team to participate in this aspect of their success. By the time they arrive at the Monday morning sales team meeting they should already know the topics and be prepared to contribute to a productive discussion with a clearly defined goal for the time they are spending in the meeting.

To achieve this, begin by holding your last performance meeting about the future of your team’s Monday morning sales team meetings. Let the team know that collectively the group has much more to contribute that just you alone. With that reality, it is time to share ownership of the weekly sales team meetings.

Some things you can do during this meeting to improve all future meetings include:

• Ask the team for their ideas to improve sales team meetings.
• Ask the team to share what they believe to be the value of a well-executed weekly sales team meeting.
• Set up a schedule for each team member to own sales team meetings – find topics and exercises, create and send agenda, meet goals.
• As a team, create a list of useful topics.
• As a team, set rules of engagment for sales team meetings.

Expecting your team to take ownership in the weekly sales team meeting accomplishes several things. 

First, they will be more engaged and make better use of that hour.

Second, they get the chance to develop leadership skills.

Third, they get the chance to improve meeting management skills which will be evident in future meetings with customers.

Enjoy better meetings in 2011.  If you would like a sales team meeting template to help you faciliate this meeting we described above, simply visit our Store to Purchase and Download the Topic-to-Win Sales Team Meeting Success.

Continuing on our mission to eradicate the world of life-sucking weekly sales team meetings, we continue with the Meeting to Win Sales Team Meeting Troubleshooter.  We are on to a highly destructive problem Sales Managers face during their weekly sales team meetings.  Join us for the journey by subscribing to the Meeting to Win blog at:  Meeting to Win Blog Sign-Up

Problem: 

No matter the sales team meeting topic, one or more people present the negative side and the meeting ends on a low note.  “Well, the reason that won’t work is…”, or “Everytime we try to do that, ….”, Etc. Been there?  If so, keep reading.

Solution:

• It is important to stay realistic AND solution-oriented in weekly sales team meetings.  No matter the team, company or product, there will be barriers to selling it.  It’s just life.  You can make excuses or you can make it happen.
• It is important to have an agenda with objectives for each topic.  If the agenda topic is to practice handling new objections the team is hearing.  The objective should be to “leave the meeting with one new idea for handing each of the new objections the team lists during the meeting.”  This sets the goal to end with a solution instead of an insurmountable problem.
• Stick to the agenda, also.  By staying on track, you will accomplish the meeting goals instead of heading into a negative direction. 
• There are problems that need to be addressed on sales teams.  If there is a barrier to selling that the team struggles with, put it on an upcoming agenda and ask everyone to come with 2 solution ideas.  The goal of the meeting will be to acknowledge the challenge, understand how it impacts the ability to sell, create solutions and develop next steps.   Instead of excuses, there will be solutions.
• When someone brings up a problem in a negative way, ask them for their opinion about how to fix the problem.  The solution must be something the team has the power to do.  Give them the homework assignment of working with their peers to come up with a handful of ideas to overcome or work around this problem.
• As a team, set some ground rules for your team meetings.  Things such as common courtesies of being on time, not interrupting one another, etc.  A great one regarding negativity is to only present a problem if you also plan to suggest a solution.  No matter how weak the solution, it is a step in the right direction and changes the entire conversation.
• Set meeting goals.  At the end of the meeting, everyone should agree that the meeting was a good use of their time.  If they just hashed out problems and reasons they “can’t”, then you will not gain agreement on any meeting goal.  It’s everyone’s responsibility to use that hour wisely.

Don’t allow the negative to creep in.  It’s a bad habit that is hard to break.  

For positive, inspirational weekly sales team meeting topics, subscribe to Meeting to Win.  We’d love to work with you and your team.

To see solutions to other sales team meeting problems, visit other articles in this series:

Sales Team Meeting Troubleshooter – Problem: The Dominator

Sales Team Meeting Troubleshooter – Problem: Chirp…Chirp…

Sales Team Meeting Troubleshooter – Problem: Latecomers

Sales Team Meeting Troubleshooter – Problem: Data Dump

Sales Team Meeting Troubleshooter – Problem: Non-Existent

For a list of ideas for your upcoming sales meeting, visit Sales Team Meeting Ideas You Can Use Today.

It’s Monday morning, is your team looking forward to their weekly sales team meeting?  If you decided to watch the football game last night instead of plan for your Monday morning meeting, we are here to help with a topic you can use this morning.  We’re football fans, too….

(For help every week, subscribe to Meeting to Win.)

Typically, when a Sales Manager doesn’t have a good meeting planned in advance, they resort to the “let’s go around to each person and hear about your week last week” stand-by topic.  Of course, one person gives their verbal activity tracker while everyone else checks e-mails. 

Instead…  try a twist on the last minute topic.

Sales Team Meeting Topic:  Highs & Lows

Ask each team member to share 2 highs and 1 low from the past week. 

In 2 minutes or less, each person on the call should:

• Share 2 Highs (Activities or events that created opportunities or moved existing opportunities forward.)
• Share 1 Low (Setbacks in customer accounts or pipelines.)
  • Everyone should keep track of the team’s lows for later.
• When each person is done sharing their highs and low, they should call on the next person. 
• Continue doing this until everyone has shared.
• Now, each person should share one lesson they can take from (1) thier own low and (2) from another team member’s low.
• To end, celebrate the highs – add up the revenue, new clients or any significant data from the Highs list.  (It’s great to see progress.)

Hopefully, this provided you with a productive start to a Monday with an interactive topic filled with practical lessons for the week ahead.

Join Meeting to Win and do better than last-minute every week.  Your team will be provided with 60 minutes of interactive and positive sales team meeting topics, complete with pre-work, sales performance book clubs, critical sales skill practice and meeting management tips every week.  We’d love to work with you and your team.  Learn more About Meeting to Win.

Sales Managers, it’s Friday.  Time to ask ourselves some questions as we head into the weekend.

This week, did I…

• thank my sales team for their efforts?
• congratulate the successes?
• spend time in the field with my sales team and our customers?
• provide coaching on live opportunities?
• address problems openly and honestly before they can’t be fixed?
• hold an interactive and interesting sales team meeting?
• remove barriers for my sales team?
• manage internal people and processes so my team could focus on moving sales forward?
• reduce the noise?
• protect my team’s selling time?
• thank valuable customers?
• follow through on my commitments to my team?
• learn something new?
• play a daily part in moving deals forward?

There is still time to check off anything on your list.  

Have a great weekend.

For help creating interactive sales team meeting environments, subscribe to Meeting to Win.  Get sales team meeting content delivered to your inbox every week with Meeting to Win.

If you’ve spent any time with me or Meeting to Win, you know that I try to pass along anything that will help you, the Sales Manager, hold interesting and effective sales team meetings.  If you haven’t been spending time here, WELCOME to the best place to improve your sales team meetings!  Here is an article by a sales consultant respected the world over.  He shares 10 strategies to help your next sales team meeting be the exception.  (Subscribe to Meeting to Win and take the guess work out of planning interactive, helpful weekly sales team meetings.)

Oh No, Not Another B****y Sales Meeting!

by Jonathan Farrington posted on The Customer Collective

My experience suggests that most frontline sales professionals, in most companies, do not enjoy sales meetings. It is also my perception that most sales managers in most companies do not have a clue when it comes to using these events as an excellent opportunity to motivate their people ahead of the next week/month/quarter, and send them back out into battle really fired up.

Even fewer appreciate the need to add in an “educational experience” into the agenda. So here are a few tips which will increase the chance of your team actually looking forward to your meetings. 

Read the Rest…HERE

Sales Meeting Ideas You Can Use Today

We are happy you stopped by.  Chances are you are a Sales Manager who is looking for ideas to improve your weekly sales team meetings…maybe even for a meeting you have in an hour.  

Let’s get started…

We believe you have come to the right place!

Since we know Sales Managers often visit our website with an immediate need, we are going to give you a ton of ideas you can use right now – most are FREE. 

Then, if you like your Meeting to Win sales team meetings, we invite you to solve your sales team meeting challenge forever by subscribing to weekly sales team meeting agendas from Meeting to Win.  For the cost of a fast-food lunch, you can get 60-minutes of sales generating sales team meeting content delivered right to your e-mail every Friday morning.  (Learn more About Us.) 

First, here is immediate help for your upcoming sales team meeting.

10 Ideas for a Great Sales Team Meeting Today!

1.  Use this FREE Meeting to Win Sales Team Meeting Agenda, Create Better Buying Experiences.  If you work with customers, you can use this always relevant topic! 
2. Invite a Guest Speaker to your sales team meeting.  For ideas, visit Wake Up Monday Morning Sales Team Meetings with Guest Speakers.
3. Start a Sales Performance Book Club.  Ask your team to come to your next sales team meeting with one book idea for the team to consider (or use a Meeting to Win Discussion Guide).  Give them each 3 minutes to share an overview of the book and why they believe it might be a good one.  At the end of the meeting, the group can choose a book.  Your next 8 meetings are covered as you work your way through the book of choice – see the Sales Performance Book Club article for agenda help.
4. Dust off your sales training manuals from your last training session.
5. Conduct a War Room session at your next sales team meeting. Follow our guide for positively and productively addressing a selling challenge. Leave empowered to overcome at nagging problem.
6. Go to the well of sales team meeting ideas with the Meeting to Win 100 Sales Team Meeting Topics e-book for $99 (or 50 cents per meeting).
7. Make your upcoming meeting about improving ALL your meetings. Your team will be grateful!  Download the FREE Kick-Off to Great Sales Team Meetings from Meeting to Win.
8. Have a fast-paced, idea-flowing brainstorming session.  As a team, add to this list of 25 Actions to Take to Improve Your Sales Performance This Year.  At the end of the meeting, ask each person for their own commitments from the list and get an update during each sales team meeting for the rest of the quarter or year.
9. Share relevant Best Practices on a common sales topic. Pick one sales topic relevant to the entire team and ask the team to share experiences on this topic, successful and otherwise.  The goal of the sales team meeting is for everyone to gain one or two new ideas on this sales topic. 

10.  Maximize limited selling time with Seize the Day Every Day, a ready-to-go 60-minute sales team meeting agenda from Meeting to Win.  Download NOW for $19.95.

Other agendas you can download to use NOW include:

• Pipeline Health Check
• End of Year Sales Lessons
• Getting a Head Start on Economic Recovery
• Habits of Wildly Successful Salespeople

Subscribe to Meeting to Win weekly sales team meeting agendas and never need a last minute idea again.  Learn more About Us.  We’d love to meet you!

This Friday, the Meeting to Win sales team meeting agenda, Anatomy of a Deal, will be delivered to our subscribers.  We’re challenging our subscribers and our readers to re-visit your deals and your approach to winning those deals.  Business has changed due to technology, economic factors, political climates and many other reasons.  Are you still approaching your deals the same way you were five – or even two – years ago?  That might be alright, but probably not. 

How do you know?

One idea is to dissect your last 5-10 deals.  Look at every factor in each deal – decision makers, sales cycle, steps, objections, etc.  Then, determine what has changed and how should you change because of what you are learning?

Now, look at your current pipeline and your NEXT 5-10 deals.  What can you apply to these deals to increase your odds of winning in this new sales climate?

We hope you enjoy the exercise.  To lead your team through a step-by-step analysis, Anatomy of a Deal, join Meeting to Win.  You’ll get new sales team meeting agendas and exercises every week – delivered directly to your inbox.  Your sales team will never be the same.