Enjoy a sales meeting agenda idea for your next sales meeting.
Ask your team to dust off (literally) the sales training manual from your latest sales training session. Assign each person on the team one section and ask them to lead the team in the exercises, role plays and discussions from the training session over the course of the next few sales team meetings. This will reinforce the training you’ve already received and give the team a chance to practice the new skills.
Start each meeting with an update from each person regarding how they used the previous week’s lesson in the field and the outcome of that effort.
Enjoy your sales meetings while building your sales skills.
(To get new sales meeting agendas each week, join Meeting to Win. We provide energizing, fun sales team meeting agendas for motivating sales meetings.)
Great weekly sales team meetings can be powerful Sales Performance Engines. Is yours? If not, there might be a quick fix to take your team to higher and higher heights.
Take the assessment to determine if there is room to improve your weekly sales team meeting.
Sales Team Meeting Assessment: Is There Room for Improvement in Your Weekly Sales Team Meetings?
1. My team would join my weekly sales team meeting if attendance was optional.
(A) Yes
(B) No
2. I, the Sales Manager, am talking more than 50% of the meeting time.
(A) Less than 50% – Others are talking the other 50%
(B) Yes, I do most of the talking.
3. We set a clear goal for our sales team meetings and leave knowing if we accomplished that goal or not?
(A) Yes, our meetings have a purpose and a clear goal.
(B) No, our meetings do not have a clear objective.
4. In our sales team meetings, everyone is expected to contribute and actively participate?
(A) Yes. Our sales team meetings are a team effort. We see it as everyone’s resposibility to use this time wisely.
(B) No, sometimes I think people are checking email during the meeting.
5. Everyone leaves each meeting with a new idea to try or a new skill to practice in the field that week.
(A) Yes, our meetings equip our teams to sell more that very week.
(B) No. We usually just go over numbers and hear what everyone accomplished last week.
6. My sales team meeting agenda is sent in advance so everyone can prepare for a great meeting.
(A) Yes.
(B) We do not have an agenda and, if we do, it is not sent in advance.
7. My sales team meeting topics
(A) Are relevant to our current selling environment – challenges, initiatives and goals.
(B) Are the same every week.
8. My sales team would say our weekly sales team meeting is a great use of their time.
(A) Yes!
(B) Probably not. I’d be afraid to ask.
If you find yourself marking (B) to any of the above questions, there is probably room for improvement in the way you execute your sales team meetings. This blog lists many resources -articles and tools – to improve your sales team meetings. Of course, Meeting to Win is happy to help, also. Contact us to set up a consultation. We’ll be happy to provide some guidance and point you to the tools available to begin using your sales meetings as sales engines.
(This post brought to you by sales team meeting expert, Jill Myrick of Meeting to Win. Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting agendas and best practices to turn your sales team meetings into sales performance engines. Join us by subscribing here.)
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As we continue with Pipeline Health Check week, we want to address risks in pipelines. If you know your risks, you can reduce the risks or at least manage them more effectively. As you examine your pipeline this week, check for these risks:
A large percentage of the revenue in your pipeline is from one deal.
You are not positioned with decision makers in late cycle pipeline opportunities.
Your pipeline is heavy on early or late sales cycle deals – no balance.
You have not added new “suspect” opportunities to your pipeline consistently.
In mid-cycle deals you do not have a crystal clear picture of the decision process and who is involved and in what capacity at each decision point.
You haven’t discussed money in mid and late cycle opportunities.
You don’t know the competitive landscape in most of your opportunities.
Your pipeline does not have at least 3X your sales goal in opportunities.
You have deals that have stalled out with no progress forward in a few weeks.
You are guessing at the size of opportunities instead of basing it on real diagnosis.
You are chasing deals that are not in your company’s sweet spot.
These are just a few of the risks to look for as you examine your pipeline. Know your risks and take steps to minimize them – the smallest steps can make the biggest difference when pursuing sales performance goals.
Sales Team Meeting Idea:
At your next sales team meeting,
Ask your team to bring their pipelines.
Go through each of the risks above as a group.
Add risks to the list that apply to your team.
Ask each person to honestly assess their pipeline against the final list of risks.
As a team, set one action item each person can do to minimize their most dangerous pipeline risk.
Plan to follow up as a team and do this exercise again, setting the next action item as you move toward healthier and healthier pipelines.
Meeting to Win provides in-depth sales team meeting agendas with training exercises, practice sessions, discussion topics and ideas to help your sales team sell more. This Friday’s agenda is the Pipeline Health Check and will lead your team through exercises that will lead to more balanced, healthier pipelines. Join us and get your own weekly sales team meeting agendas. Learn more here.
I came across this article and liked Kelley’s perspective on effective sales team meetings. I want to share his insights with our readers. Enjoy! (To get new sales team meeting agendas each week visit Meeting to Win.)
Sales meetings are a fact of life and business and they are important for a variety of reasons.
-They allow larger companies to address the entire sales team as a group.
-They offer opportunities to provide additional training (product, skills, and technical).
-They help keep your team up-to-date.
-And, they present a tremendous opportunity for your team to connect and develop stronger relationships with each other.
Unfortunately, many sales meetings are unproductive and not nearly as effective as they could be. Here are a few of the most common mistakes people make when scheduling and running sales meetings.
Meeting to Win provides Sales Managers with sales team meeting agendas, topics, exercises and training modules all designed to equip selling teams to compete and win. We know that Sales Managers get pulled in many directions and have to determine the best use of their valuable resource of time. We believe that outsourcing sales team meeting planning is one way for Sales Managers to wisely manage their time. That’s where we come in!
Below is one topic from the Meeting to Win e-book, 100 Sales Team Meeting Topics. The topic is what we call The War Room and it has been very popular this past year. Sales teams that face reality and address it rationally, strategically and head-on succeed in the long run. This means their customers are better served, also. The customers’ success is the salesperson’s goal and, therefore, the underlying goal of every Meeting to Win agenda and sales team meeting topic.
Enjoy The War Room exercise at your next sales team meeting. Get more topics by obtaining the e-book or subscribing for new sales team meeting topics to be delivered to your inbox every Friday.
War Room
The War Room exercise is a time to get together as a team to address the surrounding business climate, how it is affecting the team’s selling efforts and what actions make sense to address it moving forward.
As a team, quickly list the ways the current business climate is affecting your business. What are the most recent developments in the economy, your industry, your customer base, your competitors, etc?
________________________________________
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Begin with one item from the list you just created and, as a group, share some ideas, best practices and strategies for handling that challenge.
Challenge: ______________________________________
Strategies:
________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
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Continue this with each item until you run out of time.
LinkedIn has become a very valuable tool for me. I enjoy partnering with my connections for referrals, business opportunities, learning experiences and awareness of our industry and business climate. In the few years I’ve been using LinkedIn I’ve reconnected with former colleagues, exchanged valuable referrals, developed deeper relationships with clients, kept track of clients when they’ve switched companies, connected employers and employees, created great peer networks and, not lastly, increased sales. My point? LinkedIn is a powerful tool in my business.
In the past year, I have gotten more active on LinkedIn Groups. I wanted to share my experience and some of my best pratices for using these groups to build business acumen, share and gather best practices and grow as a sales professional.
First of all, you need to find a group that is well-managed. This means that the group manager is actively involved in the discussions and ensures that spam or selling is not tolerated. The groups that add value are made up of a community of peers that value sharing ideas and best practices for the benefit of the group – and ultimately the customers they serve. Here are three groups I am active in and would highly recommend: Sales Blogcast, Sales Gravy, Sales Playbook (If you know of other good groups, please post a comment and share them with our readers.) Visit one or more of these groups and request to join.
Once you are a member, you should share your ideas and opinions on discussion questions already posted.
If you are facing a sales challenge such as getting a prospect to take your call, overcoming a price objection or dealing with customer service issues, you can post your dilemma for the group. These groups are made up of professionals from the sales industry and are great about sharing their experiences, ideas and suggestions. You will have a great list of perspectives to consider as you decide how to tackle your sales challenge.
Be respectful of your network. You can disagree -it is actually interesting and valuable to get differing opinions. Just do it politely and with respect.
Make an effort to share news that might be useful to the group. Most groups have a place to post news. If you find something helpful, share it with the group.
Follow up on discussions you post. Thank group members for their input and continue to facilitate the discussion until it runs its course.
Invite colleagues to join and participate in groups you find useful.
Stay positive. The groups I’ve recommended manage to stay realistic and positive. They are solution oriented no matter the challenge.
Remember the Golden Rule always.
These groups are a great enhancement to your life and career when you participate appropriately. Please feel free to share your own best practices by leaving a comment for our readers.
Get active in LinkedIn Groups and reap the benefits immediately.
Sales Team Meeting Idea:
Ask your sales team to
all join the same group or
each join a different group.
At your sales team meetings, bring one of the discussion questions from your LI group to your own team. Share the LinkedIn Group’s responses and then build on those.
Or, determine a sales challenge that exists on your team and post it to the group(s) you belong to. The next time you get together, share the answers from the LinkedIn group(s). Be sure to let your LinkedIn Group(s) know how they helped your team by leaving a comment in the discussion thread, also.
(Make sure to check out the Sales Meeting Idea at the bottom of this post.)
This week we wrote about annual sales meetings that many companies invest in each year. The problem with many is that the reps get back to the field and there is no post-meeting plan – or support – to implement any new ideas, training or on-going focus. The excitement generated by the fancy meeting is not sustainable and all the company has left are the bills from the party.
If your company has made little effort to bring the annual sales meeting ideas back to the territories and customers, there are things you can do to ensure return on the investment you made. In life we ultimately take responsibility for our own success and, in the case of salespeople, the success of our customers, also. You’ve made a significant investment of one of your precious resources – your time. Now, it’s time to get a return on that investment.
5 Ways to Get a Return on Your Investment of Time in the Annual Sales Meeting:
1. Don’t try to do everything. Pick 1 or 2 ideas, best practices or skills learned during the meeting. Figure exactly where you can try those things each week. Practice your 1 or 2 new things each week until they become habit. Ask a co-worker to hold you accountable or put the action on your calendar. Pick a follow-up date to see what results you have seen from implementing the new actions.
2. Ask your Sales Manager if your team can devote 10-15 minutes of each sales team meeting to new ideas, best practices or training from the annual sales meeting. The team can choose 1-3 things that they believe can make the biggest impact on the team’s success. Each week a different member of the team is responsible for bringing a discussion or exercise to support the focuses from the annual sales meeting.
3. If you heard helpful information from your company’s CFO, Marketing Officer, CEO or Trainer, invite them as a guest speaker to an upcoming team sales meeting. Be prepared to go deeper on their area of expertise to apply it to helping customers. These internal resources can help you help your customers more effectively.
4. If there was a new initiative or training program that is being contradicted in the field, bring that to the attention of sales management. This happens often as different departments have competing goals. For example, a client of mine spent a considerable amount of time and money on sales training designed to help reduce discounting. The behavior was rampant and cut into their margins drastically. The training was delivered and everyone left with solid skills to reduce discounting. Almost as soon as they got back in the field, Marketing launched a new product and brought it to market at a 40% discount! All the marketing materials, sales scripts and contests were focused on selling as much as they could right away using the 40% discount as the main sales tool. This is absurd …and really not that unusual. As a sales rep, you can respectfully raise this concern with your sales manager and at least get the conversation going while getting some direction in the midst of contradictory messages.
5. Hopefully your annual sales team meeting provided an opportunity for you to get to know peers from other parts of the country and even the world. Choose 2 reps from outside your immediate team and commit to staying in touch with them. Put a call to them on your calendar monthly or quarterly and discuss best practices, ideas and customers. Best practices have a way of staying in the territory where they are discovered. If you take one or two top best practices from one or two other territories you will have a competitive edge and more successful customers. Bring these ideas to your own team after you learn them and the whole team has an edge.
So, after years of annual sales team meetings which, by the way, are exciting and fun and usually filled with great learning opportunities, these are the top 5 ways I’ve learned to get an amazing return on my investment. I hate things that waste my time – with these practices the annual sales meeting never did.
Good luck!
SALES MEETING IDEA:
Ask your team to read this post before your next sales team meeting.
During the meeting, as a team, choose 2 things from this list or other actions you can take to bring your annual sales meeting back to the field.
Decide what results you are looking for by implementing the changes. Be specific about the results you are looking for. If you learned new skills to negotiate price, you might want your result to be lowered average discount. Pick the specific number so you will know if you are moving the needle or not.
Then, pick a follow-up date to check your results.
At the next sales team meeting following that date discuss the results and everyone’s experience trying the new skills or ideas. Decide how to move forward.
Hopefully, your team will experience actual behavior change by practicing the new skills or ideas in the field and your return is worth the investment. Happy Selling.
(Post brought to you by Jill Myrick of Meeting to Win. Meeting to Win provides sales team meeting agendas for Sales Managers who want to equip their teams to win. Subscribe by visiting us at: http://meetingtowin.com/)
Neal Boortz is outraged this morning. To be fair, no matter which day I choose to write this, I could start my post the same way and, to be fair again, there is a lot of stuff to get outraged about if you enjoy being outraged. Today’s particular outrage is about a school district here in the Atlanta area spending $400K of federal stimulus money to take 200 teachers to a conference in Hollywood, CA for 4 days of learning and development. The justification for this includes the idea that the teachers will come back from this trip excited about what they learned and eager to implement what they learned in the classrooms.
This topic made me think about the annual sales meeting that many salespeople just came back from. January is a hot time for this. It is typically fair to say that salespeople learn a lot during these annual meetings and do come back excited. But then what happens? Well, the same thing that will happen to these teachers. Back home things continue to churn and students need to pass tests, parent conferences need to continue, a failing student needs to be addressed, discipline problems continue, the school play needs to be rehearsed, tests need to be graded and so on. Before these teachers realize it, they are doing exactly the same things they were doing before they left for the conference and the conference was nothing more than a pep rally and a chance to socialize and sightsee with peers from around the country. Lfie can get in the way of great intentions after all.
Hopefully what will happen is this instead. The school system will follow this Hollywood conference with a plan to implement the top ideas from these meetings that will make the most impact on key areas this school district needs to address. Whether that is increasing graduation rate, implementing more sports programs, raising the SAT test scores or reducing absenteeism. What is the plan and what is the plan to hold these teachers accountable to bringing back the change that will make a difference?
If you’ve just had your annual sales meeting, what is different in the way you help customers because of the time you invested to attend your meeting? Some companies follow these up effectively and many, many do not. Everyone comes back after the company has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and selling time and salespeople have invested selling and family time and …. do the very same things they did before they left. Sure, they are a little excited, but are also now 4 days behind in their day jobs. Now it’s catch up time instead of implement-what-you’ve-learned time.
Bottom line, you should be outraged like Neal if your company dragged you half way around the country for a big rah-rah session with no plan to advance, reinforce and apply the valuable lessons and information you absorbed during your meeting. I know I would be.
(Post brought to you by Jill Myrick of Meeting to Win. Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting training topics. Each agenda offers 60 minutes of sales development content along with ideas to reinforce, advance and apply the training in the field. Join us by subscribing today.)
(To get a Sales Team Meeting Agenda and lead your team through a Troubleshooters exercise, download Troubleshooters from our STORE now.)
What could you do with 100+ ADDITIONAL selling hours per year? I did the math on this a few years ago and since then have been committed to solving nagging little troubles that arise. Let me explain.
Often a sales rep will face a recurring and nagging trouble such as invoice issues, late deliveries, collections, implementation schedule conflicts and other customer service/post-sale issues. Because of my own frustration with these things, I’ve added up the minutes I spend on these issues in a typical sales week. Believe it or not, 2 hours is a low average. And, more eye-opening is that it tends to be the same trouble over and over again. So, this could be a frustration or … an opportunity.
What if I solved that ONE trouble and gained 2 hours per week back in my selling week? I chose to make solving that one trouble a priority. Even when I wasn’t able to completely make it go away, I was able to drastically reduce the time I spent on it each week. The hard part was to stop and take the time to find a solution instead of just living with it. What I got was over 100 hours of additional selling time that year – and, in most cases, happier customers and reduced frustration every day. Everyone wins!
So, quit living with that recurring frustration and get your life back – or at least 100 hours of it.
(This post brought to you by Meeting to Win, provider of sales team agendas for Sales Managers. Troubleshooters agenda comes out this Friday. Join us and lead your team through an exercise to take back 2 hours per week per salesperson. If you have 8 salespeople on your team times 2 hours per week times 50 weeks per year you get an ADDITIONAL 800 SELLING HOURS PER YEAR for your team. It’s worth the time to solve problems.)
(To get a Sales Team Meeting Agenda and lead your team through a Troubleshooters exercise, download Troubleshooters from our STORE now.)
Each quarter Meeting to Win leads our subscribers through a business book in the Sales Performance Book Club. Each week’s reading assignment and Discussion Guide are included in the weekly sales team meeting agenda newsletter. To subscribe, visit us at our website www.meetingtowin.com. Enter the promo code Q4PUSH and get weekly agendas free for all of Q4 2009. First payment isn’t due until Jan 2010. Learn more here.
Grab the following book, read a chapter per week as a team and use the Discussion Guide during weekly sales team meetings. Your team will be motivated and inspired by the new ideas and practical advice. Happy Selling from Meeting to Win.
Sales Performance Book Club
Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play
by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig
Chapter 1
Chapter 1 lists 5 premises or key beliefs. Do disagree with any of those?
Which of the key beliefs made you think about your client relationships differently? Why?
Chapter 2
Each participant should share if and how they will take one of the “No Guessing” challenges.
Chapter 3
What is different about the way the authors suggest you qualify an opportunity vs. the way you do it today?
What will you try from this chapter?
Chapter 4
Discussion questions:
Share thoughts around qualifying the resources of time and people. Does the team do this today? What are the benefits?
Exercise:
Each participant should practice the “three-part response” (pg. 85) out loud for the group.
Discussion:
How comfortable is each member of the sales team with executing the “three-part response”?
What, if anything, will each participant do differently when qualifying resources, time, people and money, moving forward?
When will each participant expect to have a chance to practice qualifying resources and using the “three-part response”?
Chapter 5
Discussion questions:
Each participant should share one “take-away” from Chapter 5.
Are there benefits to understanding the Decision Process as outlined in Chapter 5? Why or why not?
Exercise:
Take two live deals in the team’s pipeline and fill in the blanks on the Decision Grid on page 98. (There will probably be blanks since this is not in practice yet.)
What gaps exist in the salesperson’s knowledge of the decision process for each deal?
How can those salespeople fill in those gaps?
Each salesperson on the two deals should share specific next steps to complete the Decision Grids for those opportunities.
Chapter 6
Discussion:
What differences exist between the way each participant prepares and executes the final presentation vs. the way the authors suggest sales professionals should do it?
How does the authors’ advice apply to the team’s sales process? What would work?
What specifically will each participant do differently, if anything, after studying this chapter?
Exercise:
As practice, choose one person with an upcoming presentation to prepare and share their presentation for the team prior to sharing it with the prospective client.
Chapter 7
Discussion:
For each participant, what opportunities are you currently pursuing? What has been the approach so far?
After reading this chapter, what will be each participant’s specific next steps in pursuit of the top opportunities?
Exercise:
Three volunteers should practice for the group an “opening statement” (pg. 195) for an upcoming meeting with a new prospect.
Group should share feedback and reaction.
Last Words
Discussion:
Upon completing the book, what does each participant want to do differently after reading Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Playby Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig?
Exercise:
Please complete the SPI.
Each person should share their SPI (Sales Progression Index) score.
Based on the SPI score, each participant should share their next steps on that live deal.
Did the SPI reveal any surprises for the sales rep?
Is the SPI exercise a valuable exercise to use to advance deals?
How can you use it moving forward?
Helping Clients Succeed sales training is based on Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Playby Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig. To learn more and follow their blog, visit ninety five 5 at http://www.nf5.com/default.aspx.
Meeting to Win leads a new Sales Performance Book Club every quarter. These are included on weekly sales team meeting agenda newsletters. To learn more and subscribe, visit Meeting to Win at http://www.meetingtowin.com/.
