How to Run Effective Sales Meetings

The importance of sales meetings

Sales meetings are crucial to the success of any sales team. They provide a platform for the team to discuss their progress, strategies, and challenges.

Here are the primary reasons meetings are essential:

• Improve team collaboration. Meetings provide a platform for team members to collaborate and share their experiences. Team members can learn from each other and improve their performance by talking about their successes and struggles. They can also get support from their peers to improve their techniques and approaches.
• Identify and address challenges. Meetings help identify challenges and pitfalls hindering performance. By addressing these challenges, the group can discuss solutions to overcome them. In future meetings, they can revisit their problem-solving plans and make adjustments.
• Increase motivation. Meetings help increase team motivation by recognizing and rewarding achievements. Celebrating successes can boost team morale and motivate sales reps to achieve their goals.
• Align techniques and goals. Sales meetings help ensure the team is aligned with the company's goals and objectives. By aligning their efforts with the company's ambitions, the team can work towards achieving the same ends. This can also help the group work as a unit toward one goal rather than competing with one another.

In short, sales meetings are necessary because they bring about collaboration, identify and address challenges, increase motivation, and ensure that everyone is aligned with the company's overall sales objectives.

Depending on the industry and the needs of the sales team, meetings could focus on all these areas or concentrate on 1 or 2. The manager or meeting facilitator can get feedback from the team to improve the meetings and select focus areas for future meetings.

How to run a sales meeting

Running a successful sales meeting requires planning, preparation, and an understanding of your team members and their goals.

Some aspects of a meeting will depend on the unique challenges of your industry, the size of your team, the personalities and experience levels of the salespeople, and the company's overall goals. However, every sales meeting has the same basic components and objectives. 

Here are 4 steps that can help you run an effective sales meeting regardless of your team's needs or situation.

1. Define your objectives

Defining a clear objective for the sales meeting agenda is crucial to its success. Without clearly defined goals, the meeting may lack direction and fail to achieve any purpose.

As a meeting facilitator, you should write down the goals and communicate them with participants and use these aims to help create a framework for the meeting. 

In other words, every item on the agenda should focus on achieving the sales meeting objectives.

2. Create and share the agenda

Creating and sharing a sales meeting agenda is an important step in learning how to run a successful sales meeting. Not only can ineffective meetings cause delays in your operations, but they can also cost your business a lot of money. In fact, Otter.ai reports that unproductive meetings can cost anywhere between $70 to $283 billion. 

You should distribute the sales meeting agenda to your team before the meeting, giving them enough time to prepare to contribute. This agenda will help them understand what topics will be discussed, and they can come to the meeting organized with their thoughts and ideas.

What do you include in this sales meeting agenda? It's best to keep it simple. Start by identifying the objective of the meeting and listing the topics you want to cover. Prioritize the agenda by arranging the topics in order of importance, with the most critical topics listed first.

Lastly, set a timeline for each topic, indicating how long you expect to spend on each item. If you spend more time on the first topic, you will still get something out of the meeting. You can always schedule a follow-up conference to discuss any leftover topics.

3. Ensure attendees are engaged

Ensuring that attendees are engaged during a meeting is essential to its success. You can do this by encouraging participation, being concise and interesting, and creating a comfortable environment. You can also ask group members to prepare for the meeting so that they feel ready to participate. Perhaps you could even give them a task or encourage them to share with the group.

4. Provide next steps

Once the meeting is done, it's a good idea to provide actionable next steps. This ensures sales reps know what to work on before the next monthly or weekly sales meeting. 

Following up with attendees after the meeting can help reinforce the key takeaways and actions agreed upon during the meeting. You can do this by sending a summary of the meeting minutes, action items, and any deadlines or benchmarks you came up with during the time together.

You can also ask each team member what they found helpful about the meeting, what they would like to change, and subjects or issues that should get addressed during future get-togethers. The feedback can help you plan the following conferences and correct any aspects of the agenda that didn't work.

Tips for sales meetings

Here are important tips for ensuring the sales meeting is productive and worthwhile.

Start and end on time

Following a strict schedule creates a stronger feeling of urgency during the meeting. People will spend less time on unimportant subjects and remain engaged and focused on ensuring the necessary agenda items get dealt with before the time runs out. For example, if the group needs to finalize a sales strategy, they will all be focused on defining all aspects of their methodology and unified in their goal of getting the job done before the meeting ends.

Follow proper meeting etiquette 

In addition to being punctual, there are other meeting etiquette rules that can help ensure your meeting goes smoothly. Etiquette rules to keep in mind include speaking clearly, being attentive when others are talking, and thanking attendees for their time.  

Ensure technology works 

Whether you're hosting weekly sales meetings or presenting a new idea to sales managers, nothing is more frustrating than technological issues during an in-person or virtual meeting. To avoid any setbacks, test your technology and verify everything works correctly. This may look like testing your microphone settings or ensuring the video and audio of your presentation is clear.

Stay on topic

You should always be concise and never stray too far from agenda topics. It's alright to use humor and stories to illustrate your point and keep the tone of the meeting casual. As long as the jokes or stories don't distract from the agenda and goals, they can add fun to the proceedings.

Encourage discussion

You can keep the meeting interactive by incorporating activities such as brainstorming, role-playing, and group discussions. For example, if the meeting is about how to make a PowerPoint presentation that impresses clients, you can have each person prepare a section of the file beforehand or work together to create it in real time during the meeting based on the guidelines you provide.

You can also role-play common scenarios, such as techniques for booking online appointments with clients who are interested in your product or service or drafting a sales email that converts.

If you’re having difficulty sparking conversation, creating a comfortable and welcoming environment can help attendees feel more relaxed and engaged during the meeting. In addition to having a physically comfortable environment, you can ensure the meeting stays positive. Any criticisms should be constructive and not overly negative. This will also enable people to feel more comfortable participating.

Ensure a successful sales meeting

Organization and focus are important for holding successful sales meetings. However, you should never be so rigid in your planning that you're unwilling to take feedback.

To ensure expectations are met, you need to create clear goals and share them before the meeting so that all the participants have time to prepare and come in with proper expectations.

You should also take time out of meetings to ensure sales teams how to use all the tools available to them. For example, Mailchimp offers analytics, segmentation, and automation features that can help salespeople communicate more effectively with their clients and potential customers. Once they understand how to use these tools effectively, sales reps can streamline their efforts and focus more on high-level tasks instead of manual jobs like writing unique emails for each lead.