Most companies with sales teams have sales meetings, yet very few organizations get the most out of them. Understanding how to run the perfect sales meeting can increase sales at your organization dramatically.
Here are five easy tips to running the perfect sales meeting:
1. Meet Consistently: So many organizations have sporadic sales meetings. They are scheduled irregularly, rather than consistently. Top sales organizations must have a regularly scheduled meeting. That means that every sales person in the organization knows not to schedule something else for Monday at 8AM because they know that there will be a meeting.
2. Have an Agenda: So often, sales meetings run aimlessly with maximum distractions and banter. The perfect sales meeting will have a strict agenda that is held to at all costs.
3. Time-Bound: Sales meetings should have a clearly allotted time. No meeting should ever run over 90 minutes, ever. Each item on the agenda should also have a specific amount of time. Thus, pipeline review will go for 20 minutes, followed by sales activity review for 15, etc…
4. Pull Back from Tangents: Let’s face it, sales people love to talk. And when the entire group gets caught up in a tangent, valuable time is being wasted. It is critical that whoever is running the meeting keeps the conversation focused exclusively on the agenda items. If something comes up that is important, but not on the agenda, make a note to discuss it later.
5. Keep Track of Accountability: At the end of every great sales meeting, a manager must always get commitments of the salespeople for the week. This means that time must be allotted to the agenda at the end to know what each sales person is going to do. Be sure that the commitments aren’t fluffy stuff, like make more calls, but rather specific activities, like make 50 prospecting calls. Write the commitments down and review them in the next meeting.
By following these five steps, you create an environment of respect for the sales people’s time and the team begins to respect the accountability.
About Marc Wayshak:
Marc Wayshak is the author of two books on sales and leadership, Game Plan Selling and Breaking All Barriers. He is a sales expert who created the Game Plan Selling System based upon his experiences as an All-American athlete, Ivy League graduate, startup entrepreneur and years of research, training and selling. Marc has established a revolutionary selling system for salespeople, entrepreneurs and companies alike. He is a regular contributor for Entrepreneur.com and the Huffington Post Business section and holds an MBA from the University of Oxford and a BA from Harvard University.
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