Sales and Sales Management Blog

Managers, Please Bring Value to Your Sales Meetings
by Christian Maurer

A lot has been written on how to lead effective sales team meetings. Still many of them seem to be of little use to salespeople. How else can you explain why attendance of these meetings has often to be declared mandatory to ensure the salespeople’s presence?

Why does it matter?
Sales managers in general are concerned that their people do not spend sufficient time with customers. Time spent in sales team meetings is time not spent with customers. So if salespeople do not get a sufficient return from attending sales team meetings, then it is a bad investment of their time.

What is the Problem?
Let me first give you my understanding of the term ‘Sales Team’ in the context of this article: A Sales Team is a set of individual contributors reporting to a manager. Having read “The Skilled Facilitator” by Roger Schwarz I asked myself: Is such a team a work group? Schwarz defines a work group as follows: ” A work group has a collective responsibility for performing one or more tasks and the outcome of the task can be assessed” He goes on explaining that a work group is a social system with boundaries distinguishing members from nonmembers. To qualify as a work group, its members are interdependent in producing their work.

Given these explanations, do you think a group of a salespeople reporting to a manager is a workgroup? I come to the conclusion that the answer is NO. There is though probably no other group than the salespeople, where the outcome can be assessed so objectively by numbers. Salespeople are also an easily recognizable group within a company. What is lacking for being categorized as a work group is the collective responsibility for the outcome. One might argue though that the team has a sales goal. But this is the sales manager’s goal which has to be reached through the team members. So the sales manager is dependant on the performance of the individual team members. Team members however are not interdependent to reach this goal. They are paid for reaching their individual quotas. So a sales team resembles more a set of people working on similar but essentially individual tasks. Everybody has to win his/her own deals. Or in the words of Schwarz “A set of people working on similar but essentially individual tasks is not a work group”.

Why is this relevant?
Seasoned sales managers might consider such reflections as pure semantics and of little practical value. However this understanding of the characteristics of a sales team has far reaching consequences.

Examples how team sport coaches lead their teams become of little help for sales leaders. So if we look for sport’s analogies, we probably should look, at coaches leading teams of individual athletes such as swimmers or skiers where the result of the individual matters most and the performance of the team (e.g. the numbers of medals won at the Olympics) is merely the addition of the performance of the individual members. These coaches have to work with the individuals on a one to one basis. An indication that this might also be a good approach for sales managers is the fact that salespeople usually see much more value in one to one meetings with their managers than in team meetings.

Understanding the team characteristics also influences the choice of agenda items for a sales meeting. How interesting is it to the individual contributor to know where the team stands with the numbers?  Some might argue that this has a motivational effect. Salespeople are competitive by nature. So this allows them to benchmark their own performance. But is it worth the time sales managers tend to spend on this subject in a team meeting? Remember time spent in sales meetings diminishes the time that can be spent with customers. There are more effective ways to convey this benchmark information e.g. publishing a list of who is ahead, on par or below quota on the sales portal is probably much more effective.  As long as salespeople are compensated on reaching individual quotas, the only one really concerned in discussing team results is the manager.

We can even go so far, to take this as just an example of the wider problem, that meeting structures conceived with workgroups in mind are ill fitting for sales meetings. This brings as to the question:

What is an effective sales meeting?
Sales managers working with the command and control model might have difficulty with the following definition: An effective sales meeting has to bring value to the participants.  If salespeople are getting value from attending sales meetings, they are more motivated. Effective sales meetings do not need to be mandatory to assure attendance.

There is also a role model effect in this approach. Certainly since Neil Rackham and John de Vincentis published their book “Rethinking the Sales Force” it is known that the salesperson’s task in today’s world is not to talk about value but to provide value to their customers in every interaction. Salespeople experiencing the benefits of their leader bringing value to the sales meeting   are certainly more inclined to do the same in their interactions with their clients. The principle of bringing value to the participants helps managers to determine

Topics to be put on the agenda of sales meetings
First, sales meetings are to be understood as an overlay to the fundamental one to one meetings where the manager coaches the individual contributor for maximum performance (as does the coach for an individual athlete such as a swimmer). One to one meetings are also the right place for the manager to ensure that business outcomes will occur as planned. These one to one meetings are also an important source for agenda items for sales meetings.  

As an example, let us assume that a manager is faced with an increasing number of salespeople voicing a concern of being ill equipped for negotiations with customers. Putting this challenge on the sales meeting agenda would already signal to the salespeople, that their voice was heard. The fact that it is put on the sales meeting agenda also signals to the attendees, having voiced this concern in their one to one meetings with their manager, that they are not alone with the problem.

In the sales meeting, a discussion could then be facilitated on the root causes for this perceived lack of negotiation skills. This might reveal that customers want to engage the salespeople into terms and conditions negotiations earlier in the sales cycle than salespeople were used to. The conclusion might then be to enhance the skills of salespeople to become better to sell first (understanding the customer problem and articulating value) before negotiating. How to do this would then make up the item for a next sales meeting.

Depending on the skill and knowledge level of the leader, an external trainer might be needed to handle that item. What do you think will be the motivation level of the salespeople and the success rate of such an initiative compared to a unilateral decision by the manager to put the team through one day of classical negotiation training?

Giving an individual contributor the privilege of having the collective wisdom of the whole team at his/her disposition to discuss how to move forward a particularly important opportunity (from the manager’s and the individual’s viewpoint) is another candidate for a topic on the sales meeting agenda.

So are also ‘After event reviews’ (win or loss).  For such session to be of value, the leader must however ensure that the focus is on lessons that can be learned from the case. This actually can be generalized. Only agenda items having a possible positive impact in the future are of value. Discussions on status quo or dwelling in the past are of no value und cause de-motivation.

As salespeople are situational learners, the leader must insure that attendees of sales meetings can relate agenda items to their current situation. Here is an example how this could be achieved. If there is a sales process implemented in the team, the leader could ask that each team member brings an opportunity to the next sales meeting. Selection criteria for the opportunities are: They must all be in the same sales stage (e.g. Qualification) and they pose a challenge to the individual contributor to be moved forward to the next stage.

In the next sales meeting, the collective wisdom of the team can then be used to address these challenges. Not all opportunities brought to the meeting need to be discussed for everyone having some benefits from the meeting. Being prepared, salespeople will pick up points made in the discussion of other cases that might well be helpful for their own opportunity. Some facilitation might be necessary to achieve this.

From this list of examples a checklist for attractive topics to be put on the sales meeting agenda can be derived.

Checklist for agenda items
The next time you put together the agenda for the sales meeting ask yourself the following 3 questions:

1. What is the value of the discussion of the agenda item for the individual contributors?
2. How can the agenda item be related to the situation of the individual contributors?
3. What is the added value of using the collective wisdom of the team?

If you have difficulty finding answers, for a particular topic, then it is probably wise to not put this topic on the agenda.  That is if you care having inspirational and motivating sales meetings your people do not want to miss, even if attendance is not mandatory. The litmus test for effective sales meetings is when salespeople start to ask for them.

Christian Maurer, The Sales Executive Resource, is an independent sales effectiveness consultant, trainer and coach. He has a proven track record of helping  leaders of large, global B2B sales organizations to increase their productivity.

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