Making those sales meetings more productive and exciting

Meetings in a rut? Sick? Here's a dose of boring-meeting prevention.
Ask yourself these hard questions:
- How much time do you spend preparing the meeting? Little or none?
- Do your meetings have a purpose, or do you just "have them?"
- How much of the meeting is sales solutions?
- What percentage is boring, humdrum stuff?
- How much of your sales meeting is negative "sell more or else" stuff?
- How much of your meeting is sales personnel complaining?
- When's the last time you heard someone say "Great meeting!"
- Are your meetings setting the tone for success?
- Are your meetings sales-making or spirit-breaking?
If your scorecard is borderline, you're vulnerable to lackluster salespeople, who will have lackluster sales results. Which leads to higher than normal employee turnover. Rut row.
Sales staff meetings are a vital link between what your company expects the sales team to do, and what actually gets sold in the trenches. It is a place where marketing is converted to sales. But how often is the opportunity these meetings provide lost?
Sales meetings should be a forum for reporting, goal-achievement assistance, encouragement, problem solving, training, sharing and communication. The purpose of a sales meeting is to get the sales staff primed and pumped to sell.
In case you wonder what elements of a sales meeting will get the highest productivity from your sales team, here they are:
- Salespeople will produce if encouraged.
- Salespeople will produce if challenged.
- Salespeople will produce if offered incentive.
- Salespeople will produce if respected.
- Salespeople will produce if rewarded.
- Salespeople will produce if trained.
- Salespeople will produce if given answers.
- Salespeople will produce if the atmosphere is positive.
- Salespeople will produce if the sales leader leads by example.
Are these the elements of your meetings?
Here are several ways to make your sales meeting productive, fun and exciting:
- Prepare for the meeting the night before. Have a positive purpose and objective. State the meeting objective, or topic at the beginning.
- Have a written meeting agenda. Stick to it.
- Less is more: 30 minutes minimum, 60 maximum.
- Have a team member share a triumph. Everyone applaud at the end.
- Tell a story about a lesson learned. Get comments. Praise victories.
- Challenge them with a contest or new incentive.
- Make them laugh. Start with humor, it sets the tone.
- Present new ideas. New ways to capture new orders, repeat business or referrals.
- Teach selling skills. Topics such as "How to overcome objections," "Cold-call techniques," and "Telephone skills."
- Empower people with solutions, not threats.
- Be a motivational person. Give motivational tools and lessons and create an atmosphere where people motivate themselves.
- Give working tools to implement solutions and learn more.
- Get everyone involved. Ask them to open their mind, think, and generate ideas. The best "talk-time" formula for interactive meetings: one-third leader; two-thirds participants.
- Let everyone vent frustrations, not whine about them. Idea: No one can give a problem without offering a solution.
- Alternate leadership. Let the salespeople run the meetings every other time.
- Be outrageous. Give them something to remember. Something to cheer about. Something to sell about. Remember, only you can prevent boring meetings.
Success strategy: Get everyone on the team to have an appointment scheduled right after the meeting. Make the meeting so upbeat that they charge off to their appointment and close the sale.
Wouldn't Monday morning be wonderful if you started with a great sales meeting, and everyone on the team had a sale by 10 a.m.? It can be.