Sales meetings are an essential team meeting where each member’s objectives and performances are discussed. A real time for productive sales team exchanges, these meetings allow for discussions, help find collective solutions to any difficulties encountered, and motivate the team. As they are held regularly, they can quickly become monotonous.
Here are a few best practices to help keep them productive and effective.
Prepare your sales meeting in advance
Sales meetings are some of the most common types of meetings in companies – but they shouldn’t be overlooked. “Discussion” meetings that no one prepared for and that teach us nothing are neither productive nor motivating. That’s why it’s essential that you set up rituals, and keep them going. Rigour is therefore the most important rule: meetings should always be prepared!
To do so, set an agenda and decide on the meeting objective, even if they are the same each week. The aim is to remind the sales team that the meeting should be serious. With these regular meetings, it’s often the manager that calls the shots, and the audience remains rather passive.
But this is precisely what you need to avoid: every participant should have prepared their part in advance, have checked their performances and know exactly what they want to say. And while that’s easy to say, it’s harder to apply over the long term, though it certainly helps save precious time and improves productivity.
Break from routine with interactive activities
Sales teams can sometimes get bored with these recurrent sales meetings. To tackle this boredom and keep them motivated, why not try to be innovative with your sessions?
You could, for example, nominate a coach who’s responsible for leading the day’s meeting. This means the manager won’t have to run the meeting alone, and your colleagues will take on new responsibilities, boosting their engagement. This role essentially involves managing whose turn it is to speak, but it quickly becomes essential in remote meetings. You can then combine practicality and fun.
To go even further and really break from routine, why not try out games to bring your meetings to life? You don’t necessarily need to use them every week, but including a more original activity from time to time can be a breath of fresh air.
Save notes taken during sales meetings
As well as your meeting coach, you can also assign a scribe at the start of the session. The scribe will be responsible for noting down the key points, the most interesting ideas and any sticking points that the team bring up. Once the meeting is over, the scribe shares their notes with the team.
This means you have a written record of what was said, and it’s also very helpful for management. If you find that any of the roadblocks come up repeatedly, you’ll be able to put your finger on a problem that should be prioritised. Training, tools, one-to-one meetings, revising objectives or strategies… it’s then up to the manager to find the keys to the solution.
For effective sales meetings, you should use the same basic techniques as for all other meetings. Given their frequency and the fact that they should be motivational, sales meetings do require a special effort to prevent them from becoming monotonous for your team.
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To help you achieve this objective, and to make your meetings more fun and more effective, be sure to check out our meeting templates. And if you want to go even further, create your own Beekast account. It’s free and no strings attached!
