Make Sales Meetings Fun and Productive with Best Practices from Sales Training Workshops

You can gauge the health of a company’s revenue by sitting in on a few sales meetings. If the sales meetings are well-organized, informative, and centered around goals and solutions, they tend to correspond to great sales teams – and therefore higher revenue. If the sales meetings are chaotic, boring, or natter-fests, then they tend to correspond to low-production teams.

If your sales meetings fall into the latter category, here are a few tips to help. They come from facilitating countless sales meetings and corporate sales training workshops.

Focus on development

Your role should be viewed akin to that of a coach. This is why I consider corporate sales training workshops to be good models for how to run sales meetings. In addition to going over metrics and issues, you should always try to develop your people and help them be better professionally and personally. Include educational and motivational content in every meeting that your people sales people will immediately benefit from.

Encourage participation

Permit people to share their stories for the week. While you should encourage honesty and allow people to present challenges they are facing, don’t allow this to become a gripe free-for-all. Instead, ask “How can we solve this?” People should present problems with one or more possible solutions, and the rest of the team should be invited to pitch ideas. Doing this in our sales training workshops helps free up creative thinking, and will do the same at your sales meetings.

Avoid reprimands

Do not discipline or scold team members at sales meetings. Take these things up privately in a one-on-one setting, or with an HR representative present if the matter is serious.

Provide a structure and stick to it

You don’t have to provide a written agenda if you want to save a few trees. Simply announce the structure and the strict timeframe for each part of the meeting. And stick to it, or else the rhythm of the meeting will be off and you will end up rushing at the end.

Here is a sample sales meeting structure. At ten minutes per section, this would be a one hour meeting:

Headlines

30 seconds per person: 1 personal headline, 1 professional. Then a brief on company news.

Sales Skills Reinforcement

Show an Asher Sales Skills video or role-play a focused skill.

Sales Metrics Review

Establish 5 to 7 weekly metrics to review. For example: New Customer Opportunities, Existing Customer Opportunities, Funnel/Pipeline Health, Booked Discover Meetings, % of target attainment, Weekly Revenue, etc.).

Successes and Lessons Learned

Allow team members to share. “What did you learn from this?” and “What would you change or repeat, if you were to experience this again?” Ask the group for comments.

Meeting Action Items

Alternate peers to record these and send to the rest of the team. Follow up on last week’s action items as well.

Parting Motivational Message

ASHER/Dale Carnegie/Tony Robbins/Zig Ziglar.

 To run an effective sales meeting is an acquired skill, and it is worth investing some time and effort to get it right. Business sales training workshops, which require a balance of serious education and lively audience participation, make excellent models around which to design your meetings. Develop your people, don’t intimidate them!