As a sales manager, you have to be able to conduct an effective sales staff meeting. Staff meetings are a great opportunity to provide sales team training and discuss vital issues with your team. Yet, some managers hold very effective sales staff meetings, while others hold meetings that are dreaded by their sales teams. What is the difference between an effective meeting and a meeting that is perceived as a waste of time? The difference is in what you get accomplished at the meeting.
All meetings should have a productive purpose. So what is the purpose of a sales staff meeting? The purpose should be to provide your team with the information and motivation that they need to sell better. As you draft the agenda of the meeting you want to include anything that is going to help your sales team be more effective in the sales process.
Recognition is very important in running any sales organization. Some people will do more for the recognition than they would do for the commission. With this in mind, one of the most productive components of the sales meeting agenda is to recognize your team. Obviously, you want to recognize the top producer. If you set a goal for your team and they met that goal, recognize the entire team for meeting the goal. Have recognition for different things so the same people are not recognized all the time. If you are able to recognize a few people, the rest of the team will strive to be recognized at the next meeting.
One of the biggest complaints about sales meetings is they are boring. Make sure you keep the meeting as fun as possible. A sales meeting is not the time to go into administrative issues and how to fill out the paperwork correctly. You can set up a separate training for those issues that is separate from the sales meeting. A sales meeting should be high energy, high impact, as short as possible, and fun.
If you are going to have a trainer at the sales meeting, make sure that any sales team training is done on relevant topics. The closer the topic is related to helping the sales person sell more business or make more commissions, the better that topic. For sales team training, you can cover topics such as how to get referrals, how to handle objections, how to make effective presentations. You can also have the top members of your team give these trainings too.
Another great topic to cover in a sales staff meeting is success stories. Sales professionals love to talk about stories from the field. Some stories can deal with some of the frustrations that are funny now (but may not have been funny at the time they were happening). Other stories can deal with major challenges that a sales person on the team was able to overcome. Success stories keep the team engaged, are a great way to teach, and keep the meeting interesting.
Your sales team meeting can be a very productive event for your team or a big waste of time. If you invest the time and effort necessary to create an effective meeting, it will pay off in the long run.
