In this blog post, we will be discussing 20 secrets to conducting successful sales meetings for your company. Remember, it is important to ask questions during a meeting so that you can determine if their needs match what you have to offer. So, let's begin!
It is an agenda plan that outlines the topics to be covered during a sales meeting. It also includes when and where the team will meet, who is responsible for action items from the meeting, and what follow-up needs to be done after the meeting. An effective meeting agenda helps facilitate a productive discussion of key topics in order to make better business decisions.
Keep your agenda simple with clear goals in mind. Too many topics can crowd out opportunities for critical discussions during your meetings, while too little time limits meaningful interaction between members of your team or leaves little time for follow-up work after the call. Your overall agenda should focus on the following.
Identify your top priority prospect(s) for the upcoming quarter. The top priority prospect is a company at which you have a distinct advantage, and will likely close a deal during the next 3-4 months. This is a specific type of target account where you plan to make a significant portion of your sales this year.
For most companies, it's typically one customer that is responsible for 30-50% of total revenue. Identify two secondary priority prospects with short-term potential for follow-up work from internal team members during the next month or two.
Decide on main topics to cover during each monthly meeting focusing on business issues common across all accounts including qualified leads, pipeline, strategy, goals, issues to solve, pricing structures, and objections. Use this checklist in advance of each meeting to ensure that you cover what's most important with your team in a 2-3 hour meeting.
Before the meeting is even underway, make sure all the technology you need works properly for this specific meeting.
This includes wifi or ethernet connection if teleconferencing is involved, web conferencing features on the computer(s), any video streaming services you are using for presentations during your meetings (e.g., GoToMeeting), microphones/headphones for remote attendees, chairs around the conference room table, projector set up properly for business process flow or slides, and any other technology that needs to be tested will work correctly for this meeting.
Have a detailed agenda with a thorough introduction of all attendees and a projected time allotment for each item on the agenda. This will help ensure that you have all of your planned discussions covered in a timely manner while avoiding going overtime during the meeting.
Decide how often to meet with your team based on what works best for your company culture, customer base, business goals, and individual productivity levels of account reps on your team. For some companies it's weekly or every two weeks; others meet biweekly or monthly depending upon their customer base and urgency involved with upcoming customer deadlines.
Meetings are more productive when they are less frequent, allowing for more preparation time outside of the meetings than if each meeting is crammed into one day without enough time left over to prepare in advance.
If you're running a startup or small company with little account management staff, then weekly or biweekly meetings may be easier to handle than monthly meetings where only two weeks' worth of action items can be covered in one sitting.
Introduce attendees with roles and experiences relevant to the discussion at hand. This will help ensure that everyone knows what's most important about this particular topic so that discussions stay on track and avoid unnecessary elaborations during your agenda topics.
It is helpful to have an agenda that includes the specific purpose of each agenda topic so that team members know what they are supposed to be discussing during the meeting.
During your meetings, ask participants to give examples or highlight case studies where they apply certain approaches or used this particular tool in order to address a business problem with a customer account. This helps reinforce good behavior across all accounts and helps keep everyone on track with best practices at their company, as well as helping you learn from their experience working with clients.
Another great way to help ensure that people are staying focused is through weekly one-on-one meetings between managers/team leads and individual reps/team members who are involved in common accounts.
It's important to allow time during your meeting with the team for informal dialogue that may arise as you discuss each topic. For example, if you're discussing best practices around client discovery calls, as someone is sharing how they like to conduct those types of calls, there may be a few questions or new ideas that come up from other attendees.
Allow enough time within the agenda to make space for this type of dialogue and give yourself enough time before lunch (if you're including one) and after lunch (if you're leaving out today's snacks), so that everyone has plenty of opportunities throughout the meeting to share their thoughts on each agenda topic.
Make it clear that the meeting is not just for you to talk, but also for attendees to share their perspectives. If someone has an idea or thought related to the topic at hand, ask them prescriptively if this may apply better in another context (i.e., 1:1 meetings between managers & team members) rather than having everyone try to make connections during the sales meeting agenda discussion.
You can also use your agenda as a way of filtering which ideas are most important by asking participants to rank their top 3-5 ideas on each agenda topic.
It's important to close each topic with a clear outcome and follow-up items that need to be completed in order to further advance the strategy and tactics discussed.
Talk with your team about any next steps during the meeting, or if it makes sense for people to stay after and talk more in-depth on a specific topic that you would like them to take action on as soon as possible following the conclusion of today's sales meeting agenda.
Lastly, it is important to end your meeting with a positive call-to-action that focuses on what everyone should do immediately following your meeting today. You can provide an overall company update or cover topics from other teams so that everyone knows what else they may need to know beyond just this week's discussion at the point.
You might also want to give a quick shout-out to a specific team member or salesperson who has been particularly successful over the past week.
Are you looking for an agenda that will help ensure the sales meeting’s success? When it comes to the agenda, every item should have a purpose. There are eleven more secrets to creating a successful meeting agenda, which I’ll reveal in this article.
By embracing these ten secrets you will gain insights into what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to planning a meeting’s content and objectives.
1. If you want to increase your sales, start by having an effective sales meeting. Then the meeting agenda is the key to an efficient productive discussion about the potential of your product or service.
2. A well-planned agenda will make sure that your time is used most effectively with no one getting lost in tangential discussions. It will also help people prepare for the meeting and streamline follow-up tasks after it has concluded. Communicate the agenda far enough in advance that there is time to put it into action.
This will allow participants to prepare themselves mentally and emotionally for what’s ahead, which leads us directly to our next secret.
3. Time is money, so be efficient and effective when you start the meeting! One hour of wasted time by ten salespeople equals a loss of $150 per person for your company. Using a clock will help ensure that everyone stays on schedule. Creating a countdown timer or stopwatch app on your smartphone can also help.
4. Keep these hacks in mind when preparing the meeting agenda:
5. A few minutes before your meeting start, introduce yourself to everyone who has arrived up to that point, and welcome them to your meeting. Start off by quickly reviewing the agenda. This will get you into a rhythm, let people know what's coming up, and help you cover all of the bases much more efficiently.
6. Use attention-grabbing opening statements to introduce your agenda item. At Amazon, they start their meeting by going around the table and having each salesperson state the biggest problem they are having selling their product. After hearing many people complain, the same issues tend to come up. This gets everyone involved in brainstorming solutions instead of sitting back and waiting for other people to think of them.
7. Always have enough materials for every person attending the meeting. If attendees aren't prepared, they'll be distracted from what everyone else is doing or thinking about saying next, not to mention how much it will throw off the time management of your agenda if some participants are lost without the materials they need to follow along.
8. Keep your meeting on track by asking for preparedness from everyone attending, including yourself. If someone is more than 10 minutes late, start without him or her and get into agenda items that won't be affected if that person enters later on.
If you expect participation from everyone present at the meeting, make sure that you include an ice-breaker activity at the beginning. Otherwise only a few people will feel compelled to speak and others might end up feeling like spectators or outsiders not contributing anything.
9. Don't let anyone hijack your discussion with side topics; always return to the agenda items at hand. You can respectfully ask someone who is speaking out of turn to direct their comments back to the topic, or simply re-focus it back on course with a phrase like "Let's stay focused."
10. To avoid wasting time, encourage people not to read materials aloud at the meeting. Instead, ask them to refer themselves during their presentation and only pass out the reading materials once they're done speaking. Also, plan for group discussion of sales problems at the end of your agenda item rather than starting this discussion too soon in the agenda or towards its beginning.
When you do begin a group discussion, give each person time to think about their answer before they make it. This way no one feels rushed and gives a knee-jerk response that may not reflect what he/she really thinks or believes.
11. Take notes for yourself as you're preparing your agenda and attending meetings. Use these notes as a reference when planning future meetings of sales or follow-ups after one has completed. This will save you lots of time pouring over documentation looking for last-minute details about what people said during the meeting, what was decided upon, etc.
It will also help prevent any miscommunications due to simple memory lapses on your part moving forward with your product or service promotion plans. So, make sure to document everything in your meeting.
If possible, have some fun! Banter a little before launching into the serious stuff. A little bit of humor will help everyone relax and feel more comfortable with one another. Here is a couple that was used by Bill Gates at Microsoft: "There is no reason why these computers can't sacrifice themselves for you." "Let's take a look at our mission statement, let me see if I can get this right to make sure that we understand each other within minutes."
