It’s the Monday morning sales meeting and your sales team gathers together. Look around and count up the payroll in that room. It’s not a small number, especially when you combine salaries plus opportunity cost. Because, when your sales team is attending a meeting, they are missing the opportunity to connect with prospects or customers.
The self-aware sales leader must continually ask: Do our group sales meetings provide a substantial ROI to offset the expense of conducting this meeting?
Too often, the answer is “no” because limited time is invested in planning the team sales meeting.
The sales meeting lacks inspiration and leads to desperation.
“I’m desperate to get out of this meeting that is wasting my time.”
Why are so many sales meetings a waste of time?
1. There is no written agenda for the meeting. Without an agenda, the meeting turns into a lot of conversations that end up in unproductive rabbit holes. They look and sound like a game of whack-a-mole on steroids. Unproductive conversations keep popping up. “Oh, let’s talk about this. How about this?”
2. There isn’t a defined purpose and objective for the sales meeting. The sales team shows up and everyone’s reading skills are tested as they review reports generated by a CRM tool rather than their own input and data. The sales pipeline review begins.
Desperation sets in because the conversation sounds like the same conversation as the last sales meeting.
What salespeople are desperate to hear and learn is what they need to say and do to prevent deals from getting stuck.
What salespeople are desperate for is practicing proven selling skills that eliminate voicemail hell, emails that go bump in the dark and chase mode.
3. There isn’t a thorough analysis of what the sales team really needs to learn and improve at this time to improve close ratios.
Additional consultative sales skill training and role-plays might be the best use of time for your team.
Or maybe you’d be better off investing time coaching your team on mindset and attitude training because your sales team is stressed. They are tired of the ongoing challenges of the pandemic and need new ways to think, act and be at this time.
Perhaps your sales team needs more coaching around emotional intelligence skills such as resiliency and empathy. Sales cycles are longer, requiring even more perseverance and tenacity. Prospects and clients are risk-averse, requiring salespeople to improve their ability to read the emotional temperature of the person with whom they are meeting.
Running an effective sales meeting requires the EQ skill of delayed gratification. You must put in the work to plan the meeting in order to earn the reward of a well-run gathering.
For example, if the objective of your sales meeting is to improve specific selling skills, create well-designed role-plays or drill skills to practice and improve consultative selling skills or emotional intelligence skills.
Running an effective sales meeting requires clarity. Get clear on the purpose and objective of your group sales meeting before wasting your sales team’s precious time. What is your desired outcome of this meeting? Improve prospecting skills? Develop better time-management habits? Improve resiliency and emotional intelligence skills? My latest book, Emotional Intelligence For Sales Leadership, has several chapters on these topics that you can incorporate into your next sales meeting.
Avoid sending your sales team into desperation. Plan sales meetings that inspire salespeople to do better and be better.
Good Selling!
