Sales Team Meetings – 10 Tips for Winning Sales Team Meetings

Sales Managers can immediately impact their team’s performance and morale by committing to productive and positive weekly sales team meetings. This Monday morning meeting sets the tone for the selling week. At the end of each weekly sales team meeting, each participant should feel more equipped to compete and win. This is an expensive hour when you consider your entire sales team is NOT selling for one full hour. These tips can help you invest that hourly wisely. Your return should be more momentum, better morale and sales success.

Meeting to Win, LLC (www.meetingtowin.com) wants to share 10 tips to help you lead more productive, positive meetings right away. Use these tips or subscribe to Meeting to Win agendas (https://www.meetingtowin.com/subscribe). Either way, commit to having great meetings starting next week.

1. Send an agenda in advance. First of all, this keeps a sales manager accountable to planning a productive meeting instead of just jumping on a weekly call and resorting to the roundtable update approach.
The agenda should change for each meeting. If you send the same template each week, they will stop looking at it. Keep agenda’s fresh and relevant.
When sales people know the manager is being proactive and planning for their meetings, they are more likely to take them more seriously, also.

2. Invite RELEVANT guest speakers. Who could join your sales team call and share information that will help your sales people sell more?
This could be an internal product specialist who could clear up confusion or answer questions about a new product offering.
This could be a customer who could give a short talk on their experience working with your company or team.
This could be someone from your marketing team to share some current market research relevant to your customers.

3. Share ownership for a productive meeting with the entire team. Share meeting planning and executing responsibilities with team members. For example, someone can be the timekeeper, someone can lead an agenda topic, someone can send the agenda out in advance, someone can secure a guest speaker and so on. It’s everyone’s responsibility to use this time wisely.

4. Have a Team Book Club. Continually build business acumen by reading and discussing a current business book as a team. Read the chapter before the meeting and discuss it during the meeting for a set amount of time.

5. Assign pre-work. This doesn’t have to be a huge project, just a small amount of preparation so they can contribute to a successful, helpful sales team meeting. And, again, meetings are always more interesting when more people have input.
Give them an article to read before the meeting.
Ask them to think about a topic and be prepared with their thoughts or ideas on that topic.
Ask them to research something for the sales team.

6. Reinforce recent sales training. Most sales training organizations have reinforcement modules designed for sales managers to use after the formal training. Use these. Each meeting, asks a different sales person to “teach” the next module. This encourages the team to study and practice the sales methodologies and skills that will make them more successful.

7. Have fun. Celebrate even the smallest successes and wins every week.

8. Don’t do a data dump. If administrative things can be shared via email, do so. Give the team a chance to ask questions or make clarifications on something they received via e-mail, but do not dump all this info on them during their meeting.

9. Stick to the allotted time. Enough said?

10. Share Best Practices. Make sure this is on the agenda. Ask one sales person to share something they have tried that is working. They should be able to tell the rest of the team how and why they did it and share any tools that will help someone else try it.

BONUS TIP: Analyze losses. It’s painful, but top sales team do this consistently. Everyone can learn from these discussions.