Make Sales Meetings About Sales

Heart attacks are 20% more likely on Monday mornings. Most sales meetings happen on Monday mornings. We will leave it to you to decide if the two are connected, but see how many of the following responses from a recent survey about what frustrates employees the most about meetings ring true to you.

1. Allowing attendees to ramble and repeat the same comments and thoughts.
2. Doesn’t start on time, stay on track, or finish on time.
3. No specific action items or walk-away points.
4. No clear purpose or objective.
5. Not inspiring or motivating.
6. Not organized. No agenda.
7. Too long.
8. Repeating information for late arrivals.
9. Weak presenter (unprepared, monotone, overly redundant).
10. Boring. Nothing new or interesting.

Your sales meetings don’t have to elicit these kinds of responses. Unfortunately, too many sales managers show up unprepared and use meeting time for simple information transfers that could be handled in other ways. Sales meetings are not a time for general housekeeping items like mileage reports, new human resources benefits, new products and more. Those things are important but belong in a memo, not in a sales meeting.

It sounds simple enough, but you need to make your sales meetings about sales and nothing else. Where do your sales reps need help? What are the top opportunities that could benefit from collaboration? What are the big successes we can celebrate? Over the coming weeks, we’ll look at the most important three steps to creating successful sales meetings that your reps will actually look forward—preparation, follow up and coaching for success—and we’ll discuss technology solutions that make these steps easy and systematic.