Welcome to another Sales Insight blog post, where today we will look at how to run an impactful sales meeting.
It won’t come as any surprise to you that 90% of sales team meetings are in fact considered a little bit boring. This can be for a number of reasons:
- Too much time is spent looking at lag measures, those telling us how we did in the past.
- We experience ‘death by account review’ whereby each sales person gives a brief update on the status of each of their accounts. Whilst the first few may engage interest and attention, as the meeting goes on, that interest and attention wanes, with salespeople only really ‘waking up’ when it’s their own turn.
- Other stakeholders within the organisation use the meeting to share news from their own team/department. This often results in more of a ‘hijack’ of the meeting and frequently includes information that is either not relevant to the sales team, or would be better shared in a different format.
In my experience all of these things come about through, and are compounded further by, a lack of preparation: not investing enough time preparing these meetings to make them as successful, impactful and motivational as we can.
Look forward and “get real”
Of course we do need to review what’s been and gone, but to maintain focus and drive future success, let’s also invest a bit more time thinking through plans and strategies to impact our results going forward. Don’t just look at hopeful pipelines; be brutally honest about your ability to deliver on the results you’re targeting.
Live opportunity reviews
Always remember a sales meeting is the perfect opportunity for people to learn from each other, which all too often is not taken advantage of. The best way I’ve found of making sure this happens is by conducting live opportunity review sessions with your team (more of which coming up).
Limit others hijacking your meeting and brief robustly
It goes without saying that, the better the preparation, the better the meeting is going to be. Brief everyone fully, so they’re clear on what you expect to achieve with the precious time you have and, critically, how they can best positively impact your sales team. Prevent hijackings of your meetings by limiting the number you invite in and specifying the time they have to share and don’t be afraid to stand your ground; giving too much time to others merely devalues the importance of the sales team coming together.
Make the most of live opportunity reviews
More impactful and results-driven than traditional account reviews, live opportunity reviews are a highly effective way of both, accelerating your salespeople forward on existing deals and, significantly improving the outcomes. I’d suggest you put your team into small work groups, each then chooses one of their existing live opportunities to work on with their team members. Not only does this improve your chances of winning these deals and with a greater proportion of the value, but it increases your peoples’ learning and their ability to work together.
Given that around 70% of a person’s learning comes through job-related experience and a further 20% comes from what we absorb through working with other people, these live opportunity reviews are an invaluable way to develop capabilities and confidence and, as an inevitable consequence of this, increase the team’s bottom-line results.
The final 10% of learning then comes through structured training. Of course we would recommend you set time aside for this, but you should keep it to a minimum and work on live opportunities and live deals wherever possible. When you focus on these in your sales meetings, your ability to deliver results is vastly enhanced and these meetings become more motivational, exciting and interesting for all parties.
If you would like to chat a little bit more about running impactful sales meetings then please contact me on steve@salestrong.co.uk.
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