Sales and Sales Management Blog

September 19, 2011

4 Rules to Make Your Sales Meetings Meaningful to Your Sales Team

Filed under: sales,Sales Meetings,selling — Paul McCord @ 10:04 am
Tags: , , ,

 “Paul,” one of my coaching clients said, “I swear if I have to sit through another Monday morning sales meeting I’ll quit.  They’re supposed to be an hour; they always last at least an hour and a half and often two hours.  It’s nothing but a management bitch session and a bunch of side conversations with salespeople about how crappy their performance is.  I either quit or go postal, and even though going postal would be the more satisfying course of action, I’m not ready to go prison–yet.”

Richard has obviously sat through a great many of the same sales meetings I’ve sat through—and I’m sure that you’ve sat through.  In fact, I’m willing to bet a number of people who read this have never sat through a sales meeting that wasn’t as pointless, obnoxious, and downright insulting as the ones Richard has been sitting through.

I’m also willing to bet that somewhere in the neighborhood of 95% of all weekly sales meetings are absolutely, positively, without doubt wastes of time.

They don’t have to be.

In fact, regular (regular does not necessarily mean weekly) sales meetings can be the backbone of creating a thriving, high production sales team.

Most often, however, they are the ruination of the sales team.

Weekly sales meetings have killed more manager authority and respect than probably any other activity a manager engages in with the possible exception of the ride along.  They have also driven a great number of high performers to the competition, one of which may be my client Richard who is one of the top 5 sellers in his company’s 300 member sales force.

Sales people generally hate this weekly meandering through sales meeting hell and the accompanying glimpse into the hollow caverns of the sales management brain in stupefying inaction. 

Why?

I believe there are four primary reasons sales meetings are such a waste of time and effort:

1.   No purpose.  A great many sales meetings are held for no other reason other that it’s Monday (or Friday, or Thursday, or whatever day of the week they are normally held on).  Consequently, the meeting is destined to be a time waster.  One time wasting meeting is bad enough, but I know of some companies who have three or even five of these meetings every week (often these mulit meeting companies are seeking to keep control of their salespeople).

2.  No preparation.  Whomever is in charge of the meeting (generally the immediate manager of the assembled team) has invested not a single minute in preparing for the meeting.  As they’re sitting down for the meeting, they take out a pen and jot down two or three things to talk about.  Again, the perfect setting for a waste of time.

3.  Too many tangents.  Without having prepared for the meeting and knowing exactly what to deal with, it is easy for the manager to veer off onto tangents that ultimately have nothing to do with anything. Yet another factor that guarantees the meeting will be useless.

4.   A haven of negativity.  Especially during times like the present when business is tough, an unprepared manager tends to focus on trying to cajole numbers out of his or her team.  People are put up for ridicule in front of their peers because of poor numbers, they are forced to justify their performance, and the rest sit in silence, knowing their turn is next once the manager has finished “coaching” their current prey.   Now not only is the meeting a waste of time, it is a real morale killer too.

Great, so sales meetings suck.  Everyone already knows that.  What can managers do to make sales meetings valuable?

I’ve found four simple rules seem to work very, very well:

1.  No purpose, no meeting.  Only hold meetings when there is a REASON to hold a meeting.  That may be once a month, once every two weeks, once a week, or as needed.  The company no longer paying for coffee is not a reason for a meeting; that’s a memo.  Reviewing the pre-call planning steps is a reason for a meeting.

2.  No preparation, no meeting.  If for any reason the person managing the meeting has not had time to thoroughly prepare, the meeting is canceled.  There is no excuse for wasting the team member’s time because the manager didn’t get their job done.

3.   A sales meeting is not the place for individual coaching.  A sales meeting is a group activity.  Address the group’s needs and issues, not individual salespeople’s.  There is no excuse for denigrating anyone in front of the group or for wasting the group’s time for individual coaching.  Each team member should have coaching time scheduled outside the sales meeting.  The rule is, if a meeting degenerates into individual coaching, the team members are free to leave (note, however, that answering a specific issue a team member has with the subject matter being discussed is not individual coaching).

4.   Set a time limit, stick to it.  Salespeople need to be selling, not attending meetings.  Under normal circumstances, sales meetings should be kept to an hour or less.  Only under extraordinary circumstances should a meeting exceed an hour. 

Your sales meetings should concentrate on helping team members sell.  Reviewing market conditions; presenting new products or services; reviewing sales skills such as prospecting, making presentations, asking questions, pre-call planning, and the other aspects of selling and the sales process; role playing activities; and other core content should be the heart of the meeting. 

Seller recognition and reinforcement should also be an integral aspect of your meetings.  Leave the meeting on a high note, not a downer.

Housekeeping notes and announcements should be kept at a minimum—discarded completely and put into memos if at all possible.

Meetings are important, but too many meetings or too much wasted time turns what could be a valuable tool into a wrecking ball plowing through your team, leaving lifeless, dispirited bodies in its wake.  If your meetings are unorganized, are designed to do little more than keep control of your salespeople, or drag on incessantly, you’re killing your team, not building it.

Turn your sales meetings into real strengths, not team killers–both you and your team members will be glad you did—and within short order you’ll actually see some smiles and enthusiasm Monday morning instead of the deadwood that drags itself into the meeting room.

April 21, 2010

Is This How You “Discipline” Your Sales Team?

Filed under: sales,Sales Management,Sales Meetings,selling,team development,Uncategorized — Paul McCord @ 10:14 am
Tags: , , , , , ,

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on why sales meetings are a waste of time.  My complaint about most sales meeting is they waste the sales team’s time because most managers don’t really have a good reason for holding the meeting and even when they do, so few managers thoroughly prepare for the meeting so that it runs smoothly, have value for the attendees, and everyone gets out quickly.

I received many emails and calls from readers saying how much they appreciated the post—but I also received several letting me know that I really had no clue what to use sales meetings for.  Here is one sample:

“I agree with much of what you say but I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I was with your article about sales meetings.  I don’t know of anyone in my company that would even begin to consider canceling a meeting just because we didn’t have time to prepare or because according to you we didn’t have a good reason to hold the meeting. 

First, our meetings are for more than just relaying company information or doing some light training.  We use them to help discipline our salespeople. 

We hold meetings every Monday and Friday morning at 8AM sharp and everyone must be in the meeting room on time or they get fined.  They show up on time, they pay attention, and they come prepared.  If they are late, if they are not prepared, or if they’re caught not paying attention, they’re fined. 

I can assure you that our sales team knows what’s expected and the consequences. 

Maybe you haven’t tried using it, but sales meetings are an excellent tool for instilling discipline in the troops, and discipline is critical in sales.  And they are here at the company’s pleasure; the company isn’t here at theirs.”

I might have thought this email was something of a joke, except I received a couple of more in a similar vein.  And before you guess that the manager who sent the email works in some high pressure, one-time close sweat shop, he doesn’t.  He is a manager for a mid-sized firm that sells a fairly sophisticated service to businesses in the healthcare industry.

Sales meetings as a discipline tool? 

Now, I’m not naïve; I know sales meetings are used by many managers as a tool to ensure salespeople show up on time and to try to keep them in line.  But the idea that there are people who believe it actually works is amazing to me, although I guess I really shouldn’t be   

The last line in the portion of the email I cited above is the key to understanding the management philosophy that would see sales meetings as a disciplinary tool—salespeople should be grateful the manger is gracious enough to let them come in and toil for the company.  Salespeople aren’t human beings, they are things, just as the copier is a thing, to be used to produce an end result and if they don’t, they’re tossed in the trash, just as the copier would be if it failed to live up to expectations. 

Is this a sales force problem or a management problem?

If the problem really is the salespeople (which I sincerely doubt), the root problem is that the company is hiring the wrong people.  If you have to drag people in the office twice a week to insure they get to work on time, if you have to fine your salespeople to get them to pay attention during a meeting, if you feel compelled to micro-manage your team members, there is a chance you have hired the wrong people.

Chances are great, however, that the root problem isn’t with your team members but with you and the management philosophy of the company.  Micro-management is a management disease, not a salesperson issue. 

More to the point, managers who feel the need to discipline, who view salespeople as cogs in their sales machine, who must resort to fear and intimidation certainly aren’t sales leaders, but they aren’t managers either.  They are little despots who rule with an iron hand and who will likely face a general uprising within the ranks at some point.  Like any good despot, he or she will try force to put down the uprising and if that doesn’t work, resort to bribes and milk and honey.  With luck, they’ll put down the insurrection but will have learned nothing from the experience—other than they were just too soft, too nice, too accommodating.  The iron fist comes down even harder.

Sales leaders lead by example and by empowering their sales team members to excel, to thrive, to reach their goals.  They know and trust their team members, just as their team members trust them.  Discipline, fines, and cogs in the machine aren’t part of the sales leader’s world.

Sales meetings can be important not just for what they can do to help build and strengthen your sales team but what they can tell you about yourself as a manager.

What is the purpose of your sales meetings?  If you’re using them to insure your team members show up; if you’re having to threaten and fine because they don’t pay attention or come unprepared; if feel compelled to micro-manage, you need to examine not your team members but yourself because the deficiency is probably with you, not them.

March 25, 2010

Why Sales Meetings Are Absolutely, Positively, Without a Doubt a Waste of Time—And How to Change It

Filed under: management,sales,Sales Management,Sales Meetings,selling — Paul McCord @ 10:35 am
Tags: , , , ,

“Paul,” said one of my coaching clients the other day, “I swear if I have to sit through another Monday morning sales meeting I’ll quit.  They’re supposed to be an hour; they always last at least an hour and a half and often two hours.  It’s nothing but a management bitch session and a bunch of side conversations with salespeople about how crappy their performance is.  I either quit or go postal, and even though going postal would be the more satisfying course of action, I’m not ready to go prison–yet.”

Richard has obviously sat through a great many of the same sales meetings I’ve sat through—and I’m sure that you’ve sat through.  In fact, I’m willing to bet a number of people who read this have never sat through a sales meeting that wasn’t as pointless, obnoxious, and downright insulting as the ones Richard has been sitting through.

I’m also willing to bet that somewhere in the neighborhood of 95% of all weekly sales meetings are absolutely, positively, without a doubt a waste of time.

They don’t have to be.

In fact, regular (regular does not necessarily mean weekly) sales meetings can be the backbone of creating a thriving, high production sales team.

Most often, however, they are the ruination of the sales team.

Weekly sales meetings have killed more manager authority and respect than probably any other activity a manager engages in with the possible exception of the ride along.  They have also driven a great number of high performers to the competition, one of which may be my client Richard who is one of the top 5 sellers in his company’s 300 member sales force.

Sales people generally hate this weekly meandering through sales meeting hell and the accompanying glimpse into the hollow caverns of the sales management brain in stupefying inaction. 

Why?

I believe there are four primary reasons sales meetings are such a waste of time and effort:

  1.  No purpose.  A great many sales meetings are held for no other reason other that it’s Monday (or Friday, or Thursday, or whatever day of the week they are normally held on).  Consequently, the meeting is destined to be a time waster.  One time wasting meeting is bad enough, but I know of some companies who have three or even five of these meetings every week (often these mulit meeting companies are seeking to keep control of their salespeople).
  2. No preparation.  Whomever is in charge of the meeting (generally the immediate manager of the assembled team) has invested not a single minute in preparing for the meeting.  As they’re sitting down for the meeting, they take out a pen and jot down two or three things to talk about.  Again, the perfect setting for a waste of time.
  3. Too many tangents.  Without having prepared for the meeting and knowing exactly what to deal with, it is easy for the manager to veer off onto tangents that ultimately have nothing to do with anything. Yet another factor that guarantees the meeting will be useless.
  4.  A haven of negativity.  Especially during times like the present when business is tough, an unprepared manager tends to focus on trying to cajole numbers out of his or her team.  People are put up for ridicule in front of their peers because of poor numbers, they are forced to justify their performance, and the rest sit in silence, knowing their turn is next once the manager has finished “coaching” their current prey.   Now not only is the meeting a waste of time, it is a real morale killer too.

Great, so sales meetings suck.  Everyone already knows that.  What can managers do to make sales meetings valuable?

I’ve found four simple rules seem to work very, very well:

  1. No purpose, no meeting.  Only hold meetings when there is a REASON to hold a meeting.  That may be once a month, once every two weeks, once a week, or as needed.  The company no longer paying for coffee is not a reason for a meeting; that’s a memo.  Reviewing the pre-call planning steps is a reason for a meeting.
  2. No preparation, no meeting.  If for any reason the person managing the meeting has not had time to thoroughly prepare, the meeting is canceled.  There is no excuse for wasting the team member’s time because the manager didn’t get their job done.
  3. A sales meeting is not the place for individual coaching.  A sales meeting is a group activity.  Address the group’s needs and issues, not individual salespeople’s.  There is no excuse for denigrating anyone in front of the group or for wasting the group’s time for individual coaching.  Each team member should have coaching time scheduled outside the sales meeting.  The rule is, if a meeting degenerates into individual coaching, the team members are free to leave (note, however, that answering a specific issue a team member has with the subject matter being discussed is not individual coaching).
  4. Set a time limit, stick to it.  Salespeople need to be selling, not attending meetings.  Under normal circumstances, sales meetings should be kept to an hour or less.  Only under extraordinary circumstances should a meeting exceed an hour. 

Your sales meetings should concentrate on helping team members sell.  Reviewing market conditions; presenting new products or services; reviewing sales skills such as prospecting, making presentations, asking questions, pre-call planning, and the other aspects of selling and the sales process; role playing activities; and other core content should be the heart of the meeting. 

Seller recognition and reinforcement should also be an integral aspect of your meetings.  Leave the meeting on a high note, not a downer.

Housekeeping notes and announcements should kept at a minimum—discarded completely and put into memos if at all possible.

Meetings are important, but too many meetings or too much wasted time turns what could be a valuable tool into a wrecking ball plowing through your team, leaving lifeless, dispirited bodies in its wake.  If your meetings are unorganized, are designed to do little more than keep control of your salespeople, or drag on incessantly, you’re killing your team, not building it.

Turn your sales meetings into real strengths, not team killers–both you and your team members will be glad you did—and within short order you’ll actually see some smiles and enthusiasm Monday morning instead of the deadwood that drags itself into the meeting room.

August 13, 2009

Boost Your Sales: “The Secret Strategy for Meaningful Sales Meetings,” by Dave Kahle

Filed under: management,sales,Sales Management,Sales Meetings — Paul McCord @ 7:25 am
Tags: , , ,

The Secret Strategy for Meaningful Sales Meetings
By Dave Kahle

Oops!  Got a sales meeting coming up in two weeks, better get ready for it.  Let’s see, what should we do?  I’ll go over last month’s numbers, that’ll take a half hour.  Then…I know!  The credit manager has been complaining about the state of receivables lately.  I’ll have him come in and complain directly to the sales guys.  That’ll take about an hour.  Now what….

Does that scenario sound familiar?  All too often that’s how we plan our sales meetings.  The focus is on how to fill the time, what information we want to transmit, and who we want to present it. When the focus is on the agenda, it’s easy to wander off, to fill the time with needless details, and to end up with a boring and non-productive meeting. With a meeting like that it’s no wonder that most salespeople would rather be in the field, doing their jobs, than killing time at a sales meeting.

Here is a powerful strategy guaranteed to make sales meetings more meaningful for your salespeople, and more valuable for you.

Instead of starting with an agenda, start at the end.  By that, I mean focus first on the end result that you want from the agenda. Then, build the agenda to achieve that focus.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say you have a range of new prices on some of your current products. You are planning to spend an hour presenting them and answering questions.  That sounds good.  Who could object to that?

So, your sales meeting agenda looks like this:

1.  Present new prices.

Let’s dig through it to come up with the end.  Why are you presenting the new prices?  You might say, “So the salespeople will know them and understand why we are changing prices.”

OK, why do you want that?

“So they will be able to convey them to the customers.”

Why do you want to do that?

“So the customer will accept the new prices without too much objection.”

What you really want, then, is the customer to accept the new prices without raising too much of ruckus about them?

“Yes.”

And you want salespeople to convey the prices in a way that accomplishes that?

“Yes.”

OK, so let’s start there. In order to get what you want, the salespeople will need to make some commitments with deadlines as to when they will present the new prices, and then they’ll need to be trained in the best way to present them.  

 The question now becomes:  What can you do in the sales meeting that will ensure that your salespeople will convey the new prices to their customers in a way that will be acceptable to the customer?

 At this point, if it were me, I’d start at the end – having the salespeople make specific commitments to deliver the prices to the appropriate customers.  That’s the behavior you want.  But, you’ll also need to equip them to do that – that’s the training piece.  So, It’s about ending up with the salespeople filling out a document as to when they‘ll convey those prices to the impacted customers.

In order to ensure that they knew how to do that well, I’d think about doing some role-plays so the salespeople could practice conveying the prices.  The role-plays would also allow them to identify some common objections, and practice responding to them.

 Before I could do the role-plays, I’d have to demonstrate to them some of the best practices for communicating the price increases. 

 And before that, I’d have to describe the price increases, the rationale, and the best way to communicate them.

Now, I have my agenda:

  1. Describe the rationale for the price increases.
  2. Describe the best way of communicating them.
  3. Demonstrate the best way to communicate them.
  4. Organize a role-play so everyone can practice.
  5. Discuss what they learned in the role-play.
  6. Repeat the role-play.
  7. Have each salesperson create a list of which customers need to have the new prices. 
  8. Have each salesperson identify a date by which he/she will have communicated the new prices.
  9. Ask each to report, by a certain date, on how well it went.

Look at the difference in the two agendas.  The first is unfocused, and emphasizes the time and general subject matter.  The second is precisely focused on an end result, incorporates interactive exercises, and is very practical.

The difference was where you started.  Start at the end. 

One important observation.  If you are disciplined about this, you’ll soon discover that the end of every sales meeting is almost always expressed in some behavior that you want from the customer, and therefore some behavior that you want from the sales force.  In other words, you want the salespeople to stop doing something, to start doing something (like in the example), or to do something better.

Every sales meeting, and every item on every sales meeting agenda, ought to be designed to bring about some specific change in the salesperson’s behavior.

Let’s test this with some common sales meeting agenda items.  Let’s say you are going to present a new product.  Why?

“So the salespeople will sell it.”

The change is behavior in the salespeople selling something they have never sold before.  Start there and work backwards.

Or, you are going to have the president (VP, CFO, etc.) come in and present the new strategic plan for the company.  Why?  

“So the salespeople will know what our plans are.”

 “Why?”

 “So they will feel good about where the company is going.”

  “Why is that important?”

 “So, they will be more committed to the company.”

 “What will they do differently if they are more committed?”

 “I suppose they will be less likely to leave for another job.”

 “So, what you really want is for the salespeople to not look for another job while they are working for you.”

 “I guess.”

OK, start there and work backward.  You can still have the President talk, but now he has a focus on his presentation, will be much less likely to digress, and will speak to the practical needs of the sales force.

Here, then, is the secret for making every sales meeting practical, meaningful and worthwhile:  Start at the end, with a description of the change in behavior that you want in the sales force, and work backwards from there.

It will make all the difference.  

Dave Kahle has been the number  1 salesperson in the country for 2 different companies, in two distinct industries and selling situations.  He’s a high energy, intense, world-class speaker who has presented in  5 Canadian provinces, 7 Countries and 47 US States.  He has been in practice for  21 years, and in that time has authored  7 books, including Question Your Way to Sales Success , and 10 secrets of Time Management for Salespeople .  He has spoken to meetings and conventions of  86 associations, and has trained or consulted for 247 individual companies.  He writes and publishes an Ezine for salespeople and managers called “Thinking about Sales” which is distributed  48 times a year to over 30,000 opt-in subscribers.  Visit Dave’s website

August 12, 2009

Boost Your Sales: “How to Create a Productive Sales Team Meeting Environment,” by Jill Myrick

Filed under: management,Sales Management,Sales Meetings — Paul McCord @ 6:51 am
Tags: , , ,

How to Create a Productive Sales Team Meeting Environment
By Jill Myrick

Sales Managers, picture this.  You are holding your Monday morning sales team meeting.  You’ve signed on to the conference line 3 minutes before the meeting is set to start and your entire team is already there greeting one another, discussing their weekend and laughing.  You join to the “hellos” and “how was your weekend?” from everyone.  You join the conversation and at exactly the start time, you let the team know it’s time to start the meeting.  You thank them all for their time and review the agenda they’ve each already received.  The agenda topics are all sales focused and you and your team know that at the end of this hour everyone will be more equipped to compete and win this very week.  You begin the meeting.  You lead some topics, team members have come prepared to lead other topics and each topic comes with lively, positive discussion, problem solving and sharing.  At the end, everyone agrees this hour was time well spent and they leave the call with new ideas and energy for the week. 

Did I just describe your sales team meetings?  If not, no need to worry – this can be your story in just a matter of weeks. 

Today, we are going to share 15 best practices for creating productive sales team meeting environments like the one pictured above.  Sales teams can contribute, learn and even have some fun – all this while becoming better equipped to compete and win every day.   Check out the list and use the ideas and best practices.  You’ll be amazed at how fun, interactive and productive sales team meetings can be.

  1. Have a “Kick-Off Meeting” to introduce your commitment to a new and improved sales team meeting format.  Signal to the team that unproductive, boring, motivation-robbing sales team meetings are history.
  2. As a team, set the ground rules for your sales team meetings.  Examples include, everyone should be on time, complaints must also come with solution ideas, stick to the agenda, etc.  It is important that the team, not the sales manager alone, set the ground rules.
  3. Have some fun by asking the team to describe the best and worst sales team meetings they’ve attended – or endured.
  4. Create some healthy conflict or debate. Introduce a topic on which the team is bound to have differing opinions such as the way to address a common objection, negotiation tactics on a live deal or the best way to break into a new client.  Differing opinions and debate open up the team’s creativity and stretch old habits – and keep your meeting interesting.
  5. Ask the team to plan around the weekly sales team meeting as if it were a customer meeting.  Once they see these meetings are adding value, they won’t want to miss them anyway.
  6. Start on time, end on time, and expect everyone to be on time.
  7. To encourage the team to interact and collaborate, Sales Managers should resist the urge to answer all the questions. If a question is raised, sales managers should say something like “I am happy to share my thoughts. First I’d like to hear what Sally and Joe think. Sally?”  Great ideas exist on the sales team and sales managers should facilitate meetings to encourage the team to share. 
  8. Ask each team member to “own” sales team meeting success.  It is the entire team’s responsibility to use this time wisely. Each week someone can be a timekeeper, someone a scribe, someone leads a topic, someone shares an article for discussion, someone shares a best practice and many other roles.  The Sales Manager should be the facilitator and expect the team to play important meeting leadership roles.
  9. Have an agenda and then send it to the team at least 3 business days in advance of each meeting. 
  10. Fill your agenda with relevant sales topics, discussions and exercises.  Ask the team to contribute ideas and, to say it again, lead topics, also.
  11. Invite interesting guest speakers – your CFO to build your team’s financial acumen, your Marketing officer to share industry trends or a top performer from another team to share their secrets.
  12. Pre-Work should be assigned occasionally.  It could be a simple as “please come prepared with some ideas for overcoming the following objection, _____________________” or “please read the article, _________________, and be prepared to discuss.”
  13. Have an objective for each agenda topic.  For example, “At the end of this meeting I want my team to have more ideas on effective prospecting in this changing economy.” Then make sure the agenda accomplishes this.
  14. Stick to a 60 minute agenda and commit to using only 10 minutes or less per meeting on housekeeping items.
  15. Put appropriate effort and resource into planning and leading great sales team meetings.  This can be an incredibly powerful hour each week if planned and executed effectively.  If not, it can be an incredibly expensive hour.

Enjoy productive sales team meetings beginning this week.

Jill Myrick is the Founder and Owner of Meeting to Win, LLC.  Meeting to Win provides weekly sales team meeting topics and agendas for sales managers who want to equip their teams to compete and win every week. Jill has attended hundreds of sales team meetings, interviewed successful sales managers on the topic and led over 1,600 sales team meetings (that’s the equivalent of 28 years of weekly sales team meetings!) in industries such as printing & shipping, staffing, commercial real estate and, sales and leadership training. To learn more about Meeting to Win, visit www.meetingtowin.com.

August 11, 2009

Boost Your Sales: “Managers, Please Bring Value to Your Sales Meetings,” by Christian Maurer

Filed under: management,Sales Management,Sales Meetings — Paul McCord @ 7:22 am
Tags: , , ,

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.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/camaurerconsulting  
http://ultimatesalesexecresource.blogspot.com/

August 10, 2009

Boost Your Sales: “Do Your Sales Meetings STICK?” by Nancy Bleeke

Filed under: management,Sales Management,Sales Meetings — Paul McCord @ 7:21 am
Tags: , ,

Do Your Sales Meetings STICK?
by Nancy Bleeke

A group of sales reps are heading down the hall to the conference room for a meeting with their manager.  Their steps are a bit slow, they stop for a cup of coffee, peek at the Blackberry and seem to be pondering something silently in their heads. 

Wouldn’t you like to know what is going on in their heads as they enter the room?  Me too!  So we decided to find out. We asked two groups of sales reps: “What reaction comes to mind when you hear there is going to be a sales meeting?”  

Group One responses:

•           Uh oh.  What are they going to make us do now?

•           Is this going to be another day we’ll have to blitz because we haven’t made numbers?

•           What did we do wrong?

•           What fire are we going to have to put out now?

Group Two responses:

•           Look forward to them.  Always learn something.  Starts my morning off good. 

•           My manager always makes it interesting.  We brainstorm and I learn something new.

•           I hope my manager doesn’t go off on a tangent.  It wastes my time.

•           I look forward to our Wednesday morning meetings because it is a time to hear success stories as well as some objections that each of us may hear throughout the week.  As well as some tips and advice for over coming objections as well as additional selling techniques.

What accounts for the different responses?  Group One’s manager does not have regular meetings.  Group Two’s manager does. 

Which responses would you like from your sellers?  Many will select Group Two.  Yet Group Two isn’t all good.  As a sales manager, how do you get the “talk” of your team to be positive when you ask for their time?  In two key ways:

1.         Hold regularly scheduled meetings

2.         Make them productive

Hold regularly scheduled meetings.  With the availability of teleconference bridges, even remote teams should be brought together regularly.  How often?  That is up to you!  Weekly or once every other week works, though quarterly is not often enough.  The keys to making the meeting regular are to:

•           Decide on the dates/schedule

•           Commit to the time 

•           Communicate your schedule including the expectation of participation (Yes, participation, not just attendance!) 

•           Stick to the schedule

Hold productive meetings.  The objective of time with your sellers should be to equip them to sell more.  Any information and discussion needs to stick in their heads and in their actions.

Sellers report that they will make the time for a meeting if there is something in it for them – developmentally or to help them sell more.  That means including more than operation and product updates in your meeting format.   

With stickiness as a key outcome, the STICK acronym provides a framework for planning a productive sales meeting.  Using these ideas will help remove the Teflon-effect (slides right out of mind) of a boring meeting.

  S  – Sharpen their skills, behaviors or attitudes.  Give your sellers opportunity to share experiences and best practices.  Don’t make the meeting just about information.  Use the time to BUILD your team for future success.  Incorporate 20-30 minutes each meeting for this proactive activity.

   T – Timely.  Is the information and the discussion relevant to what is important today?  Don’t hold all information you have until the meeting. If you have a lot of “little” things to cover, prepare a short handout to distribute at the end of the meeting or send an email prior to the meeting.  During your meeting do not READ the handout to them!  Save your meeting time for the most meaningful topics and discussion.

   I – Inclusive/Interactive.  Put more ask instead of tell into your meeting format.  Engage and involve their expertise in topics and experiences.  With involvement comes a better sense of ownership and team.  Most salespeople spend a lot of time alone, and realizing that their team has similarities helps them stay connected to the company, which leads to retained sellers.

   C – Communicative.  Sharing relevant information is important; asking for information back even more so.  Plan ahead and allow sellers to present information or lead discussion and activity.  Let the information be two-way.

   K – Kinetic.  Adults need to DO – to take action and build information into their consciousness and habits.  Help them make the information actionable.  End every meeting with each seller committing to ONE action they will take to apply the information discussed.

With a little planning and the STICK acronym followed, your sales team will willingly participate in your meetings.  They will skip down the hall on the way, bring YOU a cup of coffee, silence their BlackBerry and have positive thoughts in their heads as they join the meeting.  More importantly, the information will stick and result in higher sales after the meeting!

 

Nancy Bleeke, The Sales Pro Insider, helps companies set aggressive sales goals and achieve them while boosting profitability by hiring, training and retaining the best employees.  Nancy shares timely tips and insight in her blog (www.salesproductivityinsider.com) and her Timely Tips ezine.  You get a free eBook, 10 Timely Tips to Recession Proof Your Sales, when you sign-up for the Timely Tips ezine at www.salesproinsider.com. For more information on sales and sales management training, contact Nancy at 414.235.3064 or Nancy@salesproinsider.com

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