We go to meetings after meetings every day. Some meetings are motivating and inspiring, while others don’t. In fact, 71% of respondents in a survey say meetings are unproductive and inefficient. So, what makes a great sales meeting?
Productive sales team meetings have several things in common. It takes some simple prep, but the results go a long way. We will go through the best tips on how to run a sales meeting to get the most out of the team.
What Makes a Great Meeting?
Everyone may have different opinions on what makes a successful meeting, but the following factors should represent the key aspects:
- Has specific objectives
- Encourages open discussion
- Stay on track
- Has tangible results
Based on these, we create a formula to help you run an effective sales meeting as listed below.
Related: See how the Pipeline CRM engineering team runs our departmental meetings with the EOS structure.
7 Steps to Have a Great Sales Meeting, Everytime
Step 1: Define the Meeting Purpose
Many times, employees or even managers feel that the meetings are a waste of time. You should avoid organizing a meeting that will be just another thing to do. Instead, you want a spark, a way to motivate and engage your sales team.
The first step is to define the purpose of the sales meeting. With the set goal, participants can easily visualize and prepare for the meeting. The ideas of the meeting could range from an update on the project through an upcoming product launch to reviewing the result of the finished task.
Step 2: Set the Meeting Agenda
Did you know that only 37% of workplace meetings actively use meeting agendas? Agendas help you focus on the matters at hand, higher the chance of having tangible, relevant results at the end of the meetings.
Additionally, agendas also play a vital role in determining the timing and purpose of a meeting.
Once you have a purpose and weekly sales meeting ideas, the detailed plan will help the team prepare for the meeting. Keeping a tight schedule will ensure that the allocated meeting time won’t be breached. It’s essential to keep the meeting within 60 minutes since the focus and attention of the team will drop off after half an hour.
A workable agenda should have:
- Meeting purpose
- Names of the participants
- Meeting length
- List of points and issues for discussion
One more essential content item is the expectations for your team members. Let them know which data, plans, questions, and other possible content they have to bring.
The agenda should be brief, bulleted, and sent days before the meeting so the other attendees can prepare in advance. An excellent resource for arranging the meeting can be detailed sales reports generated from your CRM.
Related: Learn about different types of sales performance reports to help get your sales goals on track.
A proactive agenda and excellent preparation from all involved can keep things on track, help with the actionable conclusion and next steps, and save time.
Step 3: Establish Meeting Expectations
How do you conduct a sales meeting and prevent it from descending into a chaotic and way to a long mess? You have to establish expectations.
For the best productivity, all sales meeting members have to respect the agenda and need to come prepared. The other essential expectation is to recognize the time, both the one set for each point in the program and the time of fellow sales team members.
Leading a team meeting is a challenging task where you have to let people ask questions, but also keep in mind the schedule. You will need to balance between the set timetable, give all the discussion points a certain amount of time, and keep up the pace.
Sometimes going off-topic can soften the atmosphere, but as a general rule, encourage your team to stay focused on the agenda.
Respecting the time set for each topic will result in a more productive meeting, and salespersons will have more time to be effective in their core business.
Step 4: Be Punctual
Without trying not to dwell too much into the time is money cliché, sales team time is significant to the company. No matter how vital meetings could be, it’s not more important than finding leads and turning them into customers. Starting and ending on time is the ultimate sign of respect.
Just like you expect team members to stick to the agenda and meet the timeframe, you will also set an excellent example if you are punctual. In the same way, you respect the team; they should have the same relation to the prospects.
Step 5: Ask for Individual Rep Updates
During the meeting, after an overall view of the company sales effort and status, you should ask for individual rep updates. The purpose is to get an understanding of how each salesperson is doing. As a team leader, you have to identify spots where they might need assistance.
Before asking for an update, there should be some rules. Every rep will have a time limit for the report. Ask for only specific details and information, and you can go through complex issues in-depth in a one-on-one meeting.
Avoid shaming the reps or asking tough questions in front of other colleagues. With pointing fingers, you will lose respect as a leader, and it will not boost the performance of the singled-out rep.
Step 6: Make the Meeting Engaging
The US workforce is above average regarding working engagement, but with over 70% of employees not engaged in their workplace, the situation is still not very good. On the other hand, highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability, according to Gallup.
As a team leader, you can manage the meeting climate to make it engaging. The dull and routine meeting will squeeze juice from the attendees while injecting enthusiasm and positive thinking can spark your sales team.
There are different approaches, but maybe the best is to say, “Well done.” It doesn’t have to be high praise, but a quick look at top performance in the last week and a bit of recognition can do wonders.
Acknowledging success can help with sales reps’ motivation to attend weekly meetings. Most meetings, emails, or lead-acquired milestone awards can even incite real competition among the sales team.
Another way to change the meeting routine is with new scenery. Instead of your classic meeting room, you could go to a cafe or local park, or have a lunch-type meeting occasionally.
Please don’t make it always about PowerPoint presentation, try to be innovative. Move around the room, write conclusions on the drawing board, and let your team participate in the visualization of goals and findings.
You could divide your team into groups and let them discuss minor issues and present them together to others. Some clients require special treatment, and a meeting is a perfect setting to try acting out scenarios to discuss a possible approach. Some roleplaying will lighten the atmosphere and give guidance for the sales pitch.
Step 7: Define Next Steps
Your meeting has purpose, agenda, structure, and satisfactory engagement levels. Excellent, this will have a positive influence on the team. However, without definite actionable conclusions and defined next steps, the meeting failed its purpose.
Weekly sales meeting ideas should translate into some action, and all team members need to understand what is next on the task list.
The steps could include creating follow-up emails for undecided prospects, changing the sales funnel lead magnet, trying to reach sales targets, or providing instructions for creating a report for the next meeting
Whatever you decide the following steps should be, confirm them through a summary email after the meeting. In this message, you should give a general overview of the meeting decisions and conclusions and have detailed instructions for every team member. Instead of email, you could add actionable tasks into CRM software, especially if you can attach an action to the prospect in the application.
Run Data-Driven Meetings Using the Information Gathered From Your CRM
With a clear definition of the next steps after an engaging meeting, you will set up your team for a productive week.
And yes, sales CRM software will get those meetings in great shape. You can try out our award-winning platform – Pipeline CRM – today. Get started with a 14-day free trial.
