No matter how many sales team meetings you conduct each year – weekly, monthly or otherwise – there are a handful of topic categories that make sense to re-visit every year. As you make your 2012 sales team meeting plan,here are 10 topic categories most sales teams can benefit from reviewing every year.

1. SWOT. Look at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and make a plan to address those each year. They change from year to year.

2. Objections. These can also change year to year based on the economic environment, your industry, competitor moves and your own pricing, products and business practices.

3. Seasonal selling plans. Before selling seasons or holiday seasons, it makes sense to set a plan to either capitalize on a selling season or keep deals moving during a vacation/holiday season.

4. Current Events. Take time each year to look at the economic and business environment at your top customers. What is happening in their business and how should you respond. Your customers’ businesses change year to year.

5. Book Discussion. Read a new book and discuss as a team. Keep growing, developing new ideas and gaining knowledge.

6. Guest Speakers. Invite guests to join or lead meetings each year. Fresh perspective is a great infusion of energy.

7. Pipelines.  Look at pipelines, analyze current pipelines and make sure everyone is clear what a healthy pipeline looks like and actions to take to get there.

8. Challenges. At least each year, put common challenges on the table for discussion. Leave with solutions to 5-10 common challenges and make progress year after year. Don’t settle for the same problems year after year. Be problem solvers and, therefore, leaders in your companies.

9. Start, Stop, Continue. Assess your sales practices for what is working, what is no longer working and what you should try.

10. Competition. Take time to review and analyze your competitors. They are changing year after year. Make sure you know what they are up to and what you should do to compete.

As you plan your 2012 meetings consider these 10 topics. Of course, sales team meeting topics from these categories are available at the Meeting to Win Store.  Subscribers get unlimited access to 100+ topics across 20+ categories.  Visit the Meeting to Win Store to review topics.  Become a Meeting to Win Subscriber for access to all topics.

Happy New Year from Meeting to Win.

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.

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.

The Meeting to Win Agenda that is delivered to subscribers on February 25th addresses Professional Image in regards to appearance.  A colleague who knew about this Professional Image series forwarded us an article, UBS relaxing dress code, which set underwear standards.  I had a colleague on our HR team at a previous employer who wrote the funniest dress code policy.  I wish I would have saved it.  He even went so far as to suggest “no white shoes after Labor Day”.  People’s choices in the workplace create a never-ending list of “don’ts” for an HR team to address.  This is part of the joy of working with people. 

As we continue down the path of Professional Image in our sales team meeting topic series, we wanted to share this article and challenge you and your team.  The truth is that our image does impact our performance whether we like it or not. 

Ask your team members to share their own image standards in the workplace.  What is on their list of “dos” and their list of “don’ts”?  As a team, set your team’s standards together.  You can even have some fun with this!

To get sales team meeting topics on Professional Image, visit the Meeting to Win store to purchase and download Professional Image Topics for immediate use.

It is my pleasure to give you a FREE sales team meeting topic from Meeting to Win.  Meeting to Win provides new sales team meeting topics every week for our subscribers (best deal!).  Also, you may visit the Meeting to Win store and choose from over 90 topics for immediate download (more being added all the time!).

Enjoy this FREE SAMPLE sales team meeting topic, 10 Things Your Customers Don’t Know.

10 Things Your Customers Don’t Know Summary:

It has been proven over and over that it is in the best interest of sales professionals to nurture their existing customer relationships to succeed in the long term. The cost of maintaining and growing an existing customer is considerably less than acquiring a new one. With that in mind, this topic is about continuing to educate our existing customers about how we can help them succeed. Often, we sell them one solution to get one result and we fail to expand that relationship across their organization or across our own suite of solutions.  In this topic, your team will be challenged to think about what their customers don’t know you can do for them.  They will leave the meeting with a strategy for uncovering new needs at existing customers and then sharing solutions to those uncovered needs. The result should be expanded business with existing customers. 

DOWNLOAD HERE.

Good Selling,

Jill Myrick

Owner, Meeting to Win

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!

This morning’s Wall Street Journal carried a story about Steve Jobs’ success as a result of “foot-dragging“.  The article more so shares Jobs’ high standard for user-experience.  Not only does he continue to create great experiences, he also creates a new definition of user-experience.  He didn’t simply try to do something that’s already been done and do it better, more efficiently or less expensive.  He created a new standard in user-experience and everyone else is just trying to catch up – or even just get in range.  He changed the game and, God willing, will continue to do so. 

So, how can we apply this business lesson to our own world?  As a team, ask yourselves, How can you change the game for your customers?  What user-experience can you create that could change the game?  What would it take to make it happen?

Sales Team Meeting Idea:

Before your next sales team meeting, ask everyone to read the article, How Apple Foot-Dragged to Victory.

Then, during your meeting, come up with a list of ideas to change the game for your customers. 

• Create a list of things you can do and control in the next 90 days to a year.
• Then, a list of more elaborate ideas that would take leadership and investment. 

You’ll have a range of ideas and quite possibly …innovate your industry!

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.