During the month of August Meeting to Win subscribers have been taking lessons from the past year’s top movies.  We’ve covered Limitless, Just Go With It and even Yogi Bear (who by the way, had a real sales problem).  This Friday, each subscriber is receiving The Social Network agenda.

Social networks have touched every life.  Whether you are a user or not, you are hit with the new vocabulary such as “tweets”, “like me”, “friend me”, “LinkIn with me”, etc.  We’ll ask teams to examine social networking and how it can advance – or even jeopardize – their cause in the marketplace. 

Become a Meeting to Win subscriber for exciting sales team meeting topics like The Social Network along with access to the entire Meeting to Win store.

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

Keeping Monday morning sales team meetings fresh and energizing takes some effort.  Here are three ideas to liven up your Monday Morning Sales Team Meetings.

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

1.  Athletes do this.. why not you?  Baseball players have at-bat music, wrestlers have entrance music and teams have theme songs.  Ask your team to choose and share their theme song for the quarter.  Ask them to share the song and why they chose it.  There are many things you can do with these theme songs throughout the quarter – use them during sales team meetings, set their reports to music, fire them up by playing the song on their voicemail.  Music is powerful – use the power!

2.  Invite customers to your sales team meetings.  Once per month, invite a different customer to join your sales team meeting for a few minutes.  Ask them why they buy from your company, what they hear from your competitors, what they would change about working with your company, what would make them stay or leave and anything else you want to know.  Then, do something with the information in the next meeting.

3.  Change venues for your meeting.  If you meet in person, have your meeting outside or at a coffee house.  If you meet on the phone, ask everyone to visit their local Kinko’s and hop on a videoconference.  Change venues each month.  It is amazing how a change in environment changes a mood.

Enjoy energizing sales team meetings this year.  Please send in your ideas to jill@meetingtowin.com.  We’ll share your ideas and give you all the credit. 

To get new, energizing sales team meeting topics every week, subscribe to Meeting to Win weekly sales team meeting agendas.  Never have another dull sales team meeting again – guaranteed!

As you can imagine, Sales Managers often call us to discuss challenges they face in regards to their sales team meetings.  We are addressing those challenges one-by-one in our Meeting to Win Sales Team Meeting Troubleshooter in an effort to eradicate the world of bad sales team meetings.  You are welcome. 

Today, we are addressing one we hear as a complaint from sales people and a challenge from sales managers.

Problem: 

Everyone agrees that regularly held sales team meetings add value to a salesperson’s week.  But…many, many teams have these meetings sporadically.  They are often scheduled last minute or, worse yet, cancelled last minute or, in the worst cases, abandoned completely.  Whatever the reason, salespeople experience inconsistent sales team meeting schedules.  We do know that regular, consistent communication is a key activity in any healthy relationship, professional or otherwise.  Why would it be any different on a sales team?  Lack of communication reduces morale, accountability and trust and increases miscommunication, fears and negativity.

Solution:

• Use the technology available to you to proactively schedule your sales team meetings.  Most find it’s best to have the meeting at the same time each week and simply put a recurring appointment on the calendars of the sales team.  (You may want to change quarterly just to keep things fresh.)  That way, you can include an agenda, call-in information, etc right in the meeting notice.  The sales team will plan around this meeting since it is part of their schedule already.
• This next one is the most frustrating thing for a salesperson.  DON’T CANCEL THE MEETING!  Too often, this cancellation goes out at the last minute or every week.  The sales team begins to not believe you when you schedule this meeting.  It is disrespectful to ask salespeople to plan around a meeting that you end up cancelling regularly.  Don’t treat their schedule any different than you want your schedule treated.  It is better to just not schedule the meeting in the first place.
• Salespeople in particular can get very disconnected. Often they are out in the field by themselves all week taking care of customers.  Give them an hour a week to stay connected with their teammates.  This gives them a chance to feed off of the team’s energy, share frustrations, brainstorm solutions and simply connect with those in their shoes.  Don’t deprive them of this motivational hour.
• As the Sales Manager, your team is your only job. Without them, you wouldn’t have all those other tasks anyway. So, make them your priority and let nothing stop you from your weekly team meeting.  They are your job – don’t let other things become your priorities.  At Franklin Covey, they ask managers “What is the one thing that has to happen or else nothing else matters?”.  For you, it’s that your team performs.  Nothing else you do will ultimately matter unless your team performs. A weekly sales team meeting is a key activity to have on your list of top priorities.

This is such a common problem – I hope this is helpful for Sales Managers.  Sometimes managers hesitate to schedule their meetings because they don’t know what they’ll talk about.  Those managers may want to subscribe to Meeting to Win.  We send subscribers 60+ minutes of sales team meeting content every week.  You’ll never lack for great sales topics for your sales team meetings again.  Join today.

 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

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.

The Monday Morning Sales Team Meeting is a critically important hour in the week of a salesperson.  Executing these sales team meetings poorly can leave your team unmotivated, desperate and, as we’ll address today, overwhelmed.  Because I am guessing you want to do none of these things to your sales team first thing on a Monday morning,  I am sharing the Meeting to Win  Sales Team Meeting Troubleshooter one trouble at a time.  Thanks for joining us.  As they say, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.  With a small amount of attention, your meetings can be the exceptions to poorly executed sales team meetings that plague sales teams the world over.

Solve your sales meeting problems with The Meeting to Win Sales Team Meeting Troubleshooter.

Problem: 

You, the Sales Manager, want to have inspiring, interactive and energizing sales team meetings.  Afterall, you have been a sales rep before and have endured countless horrible, motivation-robbing sales meetings.  And, yet, you find yourself leading those very meetings. 

The problem is that you barely have enough time to cover the volumes of information your boss, home office, marketing team, product team, HR team and Collections teams demand that you cover with your sales team.  Have you ever noticed that everyone wants a piece of the sales team?  HR wants to reorganize them, Finance wants to count their sales, Operations wants to get along with them, Marketing wants to promote underperforming products, Product teams want to promote their products and the Executives want to sell more.  The sales team is the vehicle for all these departments and they all want to communicate – often.  This leaves your sales team meetings full of powerpoint decks and, ultimately, turn your meetings into Data Dumps.  And, no one is paying attention unless the particular topic happens to affect something they are currently working on.  So, boring sales meeting?  Check.

Solution:

• To begin with, I happen to believe that, if done appropriately and in the best interest of sales and the customers, it is OK to push back on some of these requests.  At the very least, ask that they be reprioritized and spread out.  It’s worth a shot… I did have a VP of Sales who set up barriers around the sales teams Tues-Fri to protect selling time.  Great move!
• The reality is that companies feel that it is necessary to dump this data and aside from respectful push-backs and reprioritization, ultimately, it’s going to have to be…dumped.  So, as a team, acknowledge that this information needs to be shared and, hopefully, in many cases it is actually helpful.  Then, figure out a better way to share it so you can reserve Monday mornings for sales-generating sales and customer topics.
  • Some ideas:
    • If you have an intranet, carve out a team page and post any information that can simply be posted.  As a team, set a standard for reading updates once per week or whatever makes sense.  Last time I checked, we are all adults and can be trusted to keep ourselves updated.  Expect that.
    • Since Monday mornings are the worst time to dump, set aside one hour (outside of selling time) to Data Dump.  Call it what it is and dump away.  Everyone can come prepared for an administrative meeting.
    • Share information on a recorded webinar.  Send your team a note when there is a new webinar so they can access it when it is more convenient for them.  They can call you with any questions.
    • Create a team newsletter.  Once per week or less frequently, update the newsletter with necessary data dumps.  Again, set a team standard that this needs to be read regularly. 
    • Send this information in e-mails with clear subject lines.  I’ve seen coding systems used, too.  “A” meant read/take action within 24 hours (everyone hates fire drills); “B” meant “read/take action within the next week”; “C” meant “FYI/good info to save”.  With a good system, the team members can prioritize and manage their time around all the information coming at them. 
      • The inbox can be the most overwhelming place!  Teach everyone to use Outlook most efficiently.  E-mails can be coded and filed as they come in.  They can set aside informational e-mails to read outside of selling time.  Color code emails from important people (customers!). The best thing I did was differentiate between e-mails sent to just me and those sent to a distribution list that just included me with a code in Outlook.  Guess which one got filed in “read later”?

So, Sales Managers, be the filter and manager of all the information your team needs to be successful.  As we suggest on almost every selling challenge.  Discuss this challenge as a team, throw around ideas and come up with a solution that the team agrees on.  Then, execute effectively.  Dump your data, just do it in the least disruptive way possible.  Your team will feel more motivated and less overwhelmed.

Stay tuned to the Meeting to Win blog for solutions to all your sales meeting troubles as we continue adding to The Meeting to Win Sales Team Meeting Troubleshooter.  To get new sales team meeting topics every week, complete with a 60 minute agenda,  join 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

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

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!

  

Reading Assignment:   Chapter 3, Focus on Interests, Not Positions

Discussion Topics:
1.  In a current negotiation, compare and contrast the “interests” and “positions”.  How does that analysis change your position?
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2.  What interests are shared and compatible and which interests are in conflict?
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3.  How can you demonstrate concern for the other side’s interests in an upcoming negotiation?
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Reading Assignment:   Chapter 4, Invent Options for Mutual Gain

 Discussion Topics:
1.  Describe a time when you or a salesperson you were working with expanded the pie for you?
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2.  Think about a current or recent negotiation with a customer.  List out all the creative ideas, no matter how crazy, to expand the pie – longer contracts, down payment, cross-references business, etc.
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3.  Get with a small group (maybe your sales team) and choose a common problem.  Now following the brainstorming instructions beginning on page 61, come up with solutions.  After you are done, answer this question:  What options did you invent?
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Reading Assignment:   Chapter 5, Insist on Using Objective Criteria

 Reading Assignment:   Chapter 7, What if They Won’t Play? (Use Negotiation Jujitsu)

Discussion Topics:

1.  Describe a client from now or in the past that “just wouldn’t play”.  What was the outcome?

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2.  How would you “look behind” this objection:  “We need to be able to cancel this contract at any time without penalty.”

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3.  What positions have you taken in current negotiations?  How can you “invite criticism” of those positions to better understand your client?

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4.  In what current negotiations can you change your statements into questions?

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5.  Is there a mediator in your company that can join negotiations?  What value might they bring to the discussion?  When will you consider including them in the discussion?

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