What is the best way to run an efficient sales meeting

 The challenge of sales meetings. As we all know, managing sales teams is a complex business. And the ritual of the weekly meeting is often badly managed by sales managers.

Many mistakes are made (which ones have you seen?). One is forgetting that these meetings are basically meetings designed to do two things. To motivate and develop sales people. Not forgetting to monitor the progress of the objectives that have been set, but a sales culture is centred on the ongoing development of talent. What is the context that sales people encounter on an ongoing basis? They are faced with constant rejection, hostility, etc. from their prospects. The role of the sales manager is not to replicate this, but to motivate and develop them.

Another important point. The key word in team meetings is "team". It's a meeting that should 'benefit' everyone. Sales is a learning industry, or more accurately, a constant learning environment, and developing a learning culture is key. One of the mistakes often made is to focus the conversation on a specific individual. Instead of using these meetings to develop the whole team.

Acid test: remember. A salesperson's day is typically a busy one. The time they spend in sales meetings comes at the expense of time spent prospecting or with customers. So would your sales people pay €1, €3 or even €5? If not, you've got a problem...

Here is a structure that may be useful for motivating and developing teams:

1- Progress / Objectives.

Briefly review the sales reports. The aim is not to be destructive or to criticise anyone; peer pressure is more than enough and corrective action should be taken 1-2-1. If you have a top producer, give them their rightful place. If an individual has made progress, highlight it. Don't be stingy with compliments, on the contrary. If there's a need to admonish, do it to the group, not to an individual! It's also an opportunity to get everyone's personal news out in the open, just for a minute or two, no long-winded chitchat.

2- FAIL.

It may seem surprising, but we learn more quickly from our mistakes than from our successes. If you succeed all the time, it's because you don't get out of your comfort zone. If you play darts and do bull's eye all the time, it's important to take a step back each time.

So a sales manager who develops a positive sales culture (and this isn't always the case!) can use his salespeople's "failures" to develop their expertise. FAIL is an acronym for First Attempt In Learning. A useful approach might therefore be for a salesperson to bring in a deal each week (e.g. a slide), a situation they encountered and how they failed. Some elements that are important to include: the context, what he planned to do, what he actually did, what the sales rep thought the prospect would do, what the prospect actually did, what worked, what didn't, what was within the sales rep's control, what wasn't, what he could have done better.

There then follows a conversation that the sales manager can manage. And when I say manage, I don't mean "give the answer" - the number one role of a sales manager is to coach these teams (typically, 50% to 60% of the time). You can find out more about how to manage these conversations with less empathy than we think is necessary but with more professional development. How much coaching do your teams do? How effective is this coaching? What do your teams say? If you're not sure you know the answers to these questions but just have a 'feeling', let me know.

3- Stuck:

Review of a deal that is stuck or not progressing as planned. The smartest person in the room, is the room". So it's counterproductive not to use this "person" to generate new ideas on how to move the deal forward. Use collective intelligence.

Once again, the sales manager must avoid giving the answer or entering a critical parent if you are familiar with the concepts of transactional analysis and "Ok - Not Ok" communication.

4- Success:

Celebrate something that worked. It could be a deal that was signed, but not just that. It could be something that an individual had difficulty doing but managed to implement. A new technique. An attitude he or she has adopted that has changed his or her perspective. A specific customer situation that can be used by others The list is endless. The brain needs "mini-wins" and it is important to inspire teams to develop collectively. Big wins are built on a series of mini-wins.

5- Metrics.

There's no need to go into critical parent mode as a team. If there's good news, focus on that. If there are metrics that are not good, it's important to share them. In terms of motivation, some of your sales people may like to win or hate to lose. So you can play on that. But limit negative comments. And sharing these metrics as a team is often enough - think of the Hawthorne effect.

6- Management corner:

Optional but can be useful in certain cases. News specific to the sales team. Be careful not to turn this section into an opportunity for the sales manager to climb on his soap box.

7- Training:

In addition to the case studies mentioned below, come back to a generic approach that is important for the team to develop. As mentioned below, this could be a technique, a habit or an aspect of mindset that needs to be reinforced and how to do it. To facilitate learning, a brief role-play led by the manager helps to make the learning more concrete. Of course, the key to this stage is to have a sales methodology in place, to have developed questioning strategies to help sales reps position themselves as trusted advisers, and to have put in place the goals and habits to be managed.

Sharing a sales book you've read or a blog post that someone has read, what they've taken away from it, how it would apply to the team also provide opportunities to reinforce skills development.

8- Habit management -

Sales people only control two things. What they do and how they do it. There is no value in focusing solely on lagging KPIs. These are detailed briefly at the very beginning and linked to the individual sales plans. So if the previous stages focused on the how, this last brief section focuses on the key activities to which each team member commits. This could be placing X number of cold calls, repeating two sections of a discovery call, etc. It's only human: the more you commit to doing something in front of other people, the more motivated you are to do it. I strongly recommend accountability plans for this.