Secrets to More Effective Sales Meetings
Think back to your last sales meeting. Did you learn something new that you could apply to your selling? Or was it simply a waste of your time?
Here are three effective ways to make your next meeting more productive and effective:
1. Help team members visualize success
Some people put little thought into their presentations. Their PowerPoint presentations include mind-numbing “eye charts” of data and comments such as "You probably can’t read this” as they make reference to tiny numbers. This is a waste of everybody's time.
Instead, decide what you want to communicate. Is it a trend in profitability? Wouldn't this be better communicated with a visual such as a graph or pie chart? These are much more effective ways to show the percentage of components in a whole. Simply displaying numbers doesn’t visually communicate what those numbers mean. What your team needs to see are charts or graphs that visually represent the numbers.
Review your team’s sales numbers so everyone can see how well each person and the team are doing, and to find out if team members are on track to meet their goals or not. Knowing this information helps the team decide if they should continue to focus on what’s working, or else change their focus and try something different. And if you display this information with eye-catching visuals, people will quickly see “we’re on track” or “we’ve got work to do.”
2. Turn team members into teachers
Wouldn’t you like your sales team to learn some new ideas at your next sales meeting so they can sell more? They may even shorten their sales cycle from a new idea. Here’s what you can do: Require everyone to bring one idea to the next meeting. Ask people to share something they do that makes them successful at increasing sales or shortening their sales cycle.
Too many managers either don’t have a learning component to their sales meetings or they waste their salespeople’s time because they aren't asking people ahead of time to bring ideas to meetings. Meetings are more productive when people come prepared.
It’s a bad idea to put people on the spot by setting them up to fail. Some managers, however, think that’s a good idea. It’s not. It creates angry salespeople who tune out and end up thinking it’s not important to contribute to the team.
3. Be sure everyone is speaking the same language
I’ve attended sales meetings where the salespeople reported that deals were closing and everything was great. Wouldn't such a meeting be a big waste of time if all the deals were really closing? Management unfortunately actually believed that the deals would close.
Instead, each sales team should agree on what needs to happen to move a prospect through the sales stages. For example, understand that you have a viable prospect when you uncover why a prospect needs your product or service and you're able to meet that need. Until that point, however, you don’t have a prospect.
Other key activities that move a prospect through sales stages are when you identify key decision makers, make a presentation, or establish a trial. Be sure your sales team talks about activities that are actually occurring with an account and not what they think is happening during territory updates.
Sales meetings are like any other meeting. All too often they’re unplanned, unfocused, and a big waste of time. At your next sales meeting, why not come well prepared, involve your sales team with a learning activity, and share concrete ideas on how to transform prospects into customers? That’s the best way to run an effective sales meeting—and your sales team will probably sell more as a result!
