Agenda for Highly Effective Sales Team Meetings
Leading salespeople can be like herding cats because great sales people have very strong and independent natures.
Yet your sales team meetings can be effective and engaging if you utilize the following suggestions as part of the meeting agenda. This tip offers proven tactics on each of the five dimensions of the Sales Star coaching model.
Morale
I start sales team meetings with “successes.”
I ask everyone to think of something they did that was outside of their comfort zone, since our last meeting.
Then I ask them to pick an example that resulted in a success.
Not everyone has a success every week, but every week someone has a success.
It’s great to start on a positive note.
Here are two additional morale booster ideas from top sales leaders for your next sales team meeting:
- A challenge made to another regional sales team, in which the losing team’s manager has to do something funny and slightly embarrassing.
- Celebrate progress toward a goal. For example, a bottle of suntan lotion to everybody qualified for the club trip year-to-date. This idea I borrow from a great sales leader in a large organization who had no control over the compensation plan or sales incentives. But she maximized the motivation those programs provided to her sales team. I saw that reps proudly displaying the bottle of lotion as a badge of honor.
Beliefs
Sales team meetings are particularly powerful if you use call recordings like game film. Witnessing something done first-hand impacts beliefs.
Transformational sales leadership is about changing beliefs.
Activity
A weekly sales team meeting is an opportunity to use positive peer pressure to motivate your salespeople to do the behaviors that fill the sales funnel.
Like a Jenny Craig weigh-in, your reps will more be motivated every day to do the more distasteful sales chores when there is weekly, public accountability.
Top performers tend to build behavior traps like this to motivate themselves.
The rest of your sales team needs your help to learn this motivational secret of top sales performers.
Ability
Many sales leaders were sales superstars. Since superstars do not need a lot of help, you may hesitate to give performance feedback. A superstar thinks it is micro-managing. Instead think of Tom Landry’s words:
“My job as a coach is to make people do what they don’t want to do, so they can be what they want to be.”
Methods for working on Ability in a sales team meeting:
- Game film critiques using a defined rubric, like The Perfect Discovery Call Coach’s Checklist or The Perfect Outbound Call Coach’s Checklist
- Opportunity X-Rays
These are all ways to accurately assess and improve sales ability. Please note all of these sales coaching techniques emphasize the QUALITY of sales performance by providing a clear standard for optimum sales performance.
Salespeople are motivated to improve, but do not always know how. If you give specific, actionable and credible advice, they will act on it.
When they try new sales skills and succeed, they are motivated by that success. Sales is a hard profession. Success is the ultimate sales motivator. Motivate your salespeople by helping them succeed.
Click to download the sales tips and resources mentioned above from the Coach’s Toolbox.
Style
Style trumps substance.
Because style is such a personal area, it is hard to provide feedback on a person’s demeanor.
Use of call recordings as sales game film make this job a lot easier because they witness their appearance and mannerisms as a third party does.