MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the cost of unproductive meetings (Perlow, Hadley, and Eun 2017). For example, let's assume that you have a weekly, 1-hour sales meeting with 10 people on your team, and they make an average of $150,000 each per year. The cost of that 1-hour meeting is $1,050. If you were to have 50 of those per year, the average annual cost of your sales meetings would be $50,250. The questions you want to ask yourself are: “Are my sales meetings productive? Are they worth the time my salespeople are out of the field/off the phones engaged in a non-revenue generating activity?” If you answered “No” to one or both questions, then be glad you have this book in your hands right now because we have gathered best practices from over 2,500 sales managers on how they conduct productive sales meetings. What's in this chapter could add some potential value to your sales organization and your sales team.

What we're going to do in this chapter is to share with you a proven sales meeting process because we believe that there are certain elements that every sales meeting should have. We realize you need to mix it up from time to time and we're going to give you some ideas and best practices of other activities you can weave into the sales meeting process we are providing. You can bring these activities into your sales meetings when needed, without breaking away from your sales meeting process.

A sales meeting is a tremendous opportunity for you to focus your sales team, build their confidence, and conduct skill development training. You can turn sales meetings into productive time if you understand how to prepare for, facilitate, and sequence the events in the meeting. Sales is a job that requires tremendous motivation and enthusiasm. You must think in terms of turning your sales meeting into an opportunity to energize, focus, and inspire your sales team.

Enthusiasm is the yeast that rises the dough.

—Paul J. Meyer

Earlier in the book we discussed the benefits of having a repeatable process for your sales meetings that you can customize. It also makes sense for you to conduct your sales meetings on a consistent basis. You will determine the frequency that is best for your team, such as weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, at the same time, on the same day of the week (e.g. the second Monday of the month at 8:00 a.m.). This will enable your sales team to get into a routine and form the habit of blocking off time and attending meetings consistently. By having the same sales meeting process and conducting the meetings with consistent frequency, your chances of conducting productive sales meetings will increase. Here's why: your sales team will know exactly when the meeting will be held, day of the week and time, and what's going to happen when they get there. As a result, attendance, participation, and engagement will improve.

What you don't want to do is repeatedly change the day/time of your sales meeting to fit around your schedule. You will be sending a message to your team that the meeting isn't important and that your time is more important than theirs.

Based on our experience in partnering with our clients, we have developed a framework that has the important elements of an effective sales meeting. Now, let's overview a sales meeting process based on that framework which could serve as a roadmap for you. We will lay out what the process looks like based on a sales meeting agenda. Then we will break it down one step at a time and show you exactly how to conduct the meeting following the process. After that, we will touch on a variety of other activities you can move in and out of this sales meeting process when necessary.

Top Ten Reasons Why Salespeople Hate Sales Meetings

Just for the heck of it, let's overview why salespeople do not like to take time out of their day, week, or month to attend unproductive sales meetings, keeping in mind that we could probably write an entire book on this topic. We'll try to keep it brief. While you read through these 10 reasons, please circle or highlight the ones that resonate with you. Here we go.

1. The meeting is for the sake of having a meeting. There is no clear objective or goal.
2. The meetings don't start on time, don't end on time, and run too long.
3. The meeting doesn't start on a positive note or end on a positive note; nor does it follow any sort of agenda. There is no consistent process or flow to the meeting.
4. It's not really a sales meeting, it's an operations meeting, status update, gripe session, and the sales manager talks the whole time.
5. Best practices, success stories, and new ideas are not shared.
6. There is no training, interactivity, or participation on the part of the sales team in the meeting. They don't learn anything new or reinforce existing skills.
7. There is very little recognition or praise given to members of the sales team to acknowledge their performance.
8. The tone of the meeting is negative. The team leaves feeling like they have had a good old-fashioned ass-whoopin'. It's a sales beating, not a sales meeting.
9. The meetings are boring. The meetings are boring. The meetings are boring.
10. As a result of the nine reasons above, salespeople show up to the meeting with a bad attitude. They would rather be out selling, making money, than sitting in the conference room, warming up a chair, trying to stay awake and checking their phone under the table, hoping the sales manager doesn't notice.

You have probably not had anything as ridiculous as any of these 10 things occur with your sales meetings. But, on the odd chance that you have, which of these 10 reasons resonated with you and why?

Sales Meeting Agenda

As you look at the sales meeting agenda below, you will notice that it is scheduled for 1 hour. We recommend that your sales meetings last no more than 1 hour because some salespeople tend to have limited attention spans. In conducting thousands of live and virtual sales meetings/training sessions, we have found that our observations on participants' attention spans are in line with the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule. About 80% of your salespeople will stay engaged for 30 minutes. At 40 minutes, it drops to 60%. At 50 minutes, it drops to 40%. It continues to go downhill from there. If you have a large team, you may need the entire hour. If you have a smaller sales team that is very experienced, you may be able to conduct this meeting in 45 minutes. You will still use the same process and sequence, but you will adapt how much time you allocate to each topic. So, here is what the meeting agenda could look like:

A best practice is to share the agenda with your sales team prior to the meeting. This will enable them to understand what is going to happen and prepare for the meeting. When salespeople know what to expect, they will be better prepared when they come to the meeting, which will increase the efficiency of the meeting, reducing the amount of time to conduct the meeting and improving the productivity of the meeting.

The End Game

Over time, your team will adjust and get comfortable with the format of the sales meeting. Once that has happened, the next step is to begin to coach and train members of your sales team to take a leadership role for conducting specific activities in the sales meeting. You will be grooming them as peer-to-peer coaches and/or potential future sales leaders in the company. They benefit by developing their skills and abilities in conducting sales meetings, which could positively impact their career path.

Once you have developed a few peer-to-peer coaches on your team, you can then begin to rotate responsibility for the sales meeting to different salespeople on the team. At some point, it is very common for somebody on your sales team to conduct the entire meeting on their own. You can then begin to rotate the responsibility for conducting the entire sales meeting among the members of your sales team. When you do this, an amazing transformation will occur in your sales meetings. When they are running the sales meetings with and for each other, their attention, buy-in, and engagement will dramatically increase the productivity of the sales meetings. The reason is that the quality of a sales meeting is in direct correlation with the quality of the participation in the meeting.

Anchoring back to Chapter 8, where we discussed the role of the practice coach, the game coach, and then the practice coach, you will ultimately follow the same exact process in coaching and training your salespeople in the sales meetings. Once you have this process embedded, you will focus your time and energy on practicing with your salespeople how to conduct elements of the meeting. You will then observe them conducting the sales meeting. When the meeting is over, you will deliver performance feedback and, once again, you will be the practice coach. Imagine a world where your salespeople are conducting all of your sales meetings and are supportive, cooperative, respectful, and encouraging each other in their efforts.

We just wanted to give you the long-term play, where you could ultimately go with this sales meeting process. The endgame is an evolution from you leading the sales meetings, to them conducting the sales meetings with you observing the meeting and giving them feedback.

Now that we've covered the endgame, let's get right back to the sales meeting process that we overviewed and dive into how to prepare for the meeting.

Preparation

Preparation is everything. Noah did not start building the ark when it was raining.

—Warren Buffett

Many sales managers put their meetings together at the last second, and it shows. Preparation makes for a more meaningful experience at the meeting. So, how do you prepare to conduct a sales meeting? Here are some best practices to help you get ready. Prior to the sales meeting:

• Think about what is happening with your sales team to help you formulate your agenda. For example:
  • If your team is having difficulty getting sales appointments because they are struggling with overcoming objections, you may want to have overcoming objections as the focus of your skill development training session.
  • As it relates to goal reporting/setting, you could look at your sales dashboard for metrics, win rates, average deal size, and opportunities in the pipeline to help you prepare your talking points at that point in the meeting.
• Prepare the opening inspiration, your success story, the skill development training topic you will cover, talking points for goal reporting and goal setting on how the overall team is doing against their goals, the logistics for the next meeting, and the closing inspiration.
• Select and ask a salesperson to take notes in the meeting, write the summary after the meeting, and distribute the meeting summary to all participants.
• Distribute the agenda for the sales meeting in an email or as an attachment to the calendar/Outlook meeting invitation prior to the meeting. Have it in a printed format or onscreen at the sales meeting so everyone attending can see it.
• Prepare whatever will be needed to facilitate the skill development training session. Send any materials to your salespeople prior to the meeting with instructions for how to prepare prior to coming to the meeting.
• Send an email to your salespeople and remind them to prepare for the meeting by:
  • Being ready to share a success story.
  • Reviewing and completing any pre-meeting assignment for skill development training.
  • Being ready for goal reporting/setting.
• Be prepared at game time. You are leading the meeting. Arrive at the meeting early enough to get the room set up, distribute materials, confirm technology is in place for sharing visuals, and connect with remote team members.

Welcome/Overview Agenda

Now that you're prepared for your meeting, let's overview how you will begin. You will begin by welcoming your sales team to the meeting, complimenting them for being on time, and warming up the room with relevant small talk (last night's game, the weather, current events) to create a buzz in the room. You will then briefly walk your team through the agenda for the meeting. Keep in mind that you have already sent them the agenda and it is visible to everyone in the meeting. Remote attendees should have the agenda in front of them as well. When you are prepared for the meeting and you know what you want to achieve, you come into the meeting on a mission, with a sense of purpose and confidence, knowing what you want to accomplish in that meeting. That mindset will manifest itself in your presence as you stand in front of the room and begin to overview what's going to happen in the meeting. Standing up creates more energy in the room, as opposed to sitting down. Remember, “motion creates emotion.” Since you prepared before the meeting, as you overview the agenda, enthusiasm and conviction will come through in your voice, based on your personality and style as a sales manager. Your level of enthusiasm, or lack thereof, will be contagious. That could potentially set the tone for the rest of the meeting.

As you read the following example of welcoming and overviewing the agenda, read it either out loud or to yourself with a level of enthusiasm as if you were using those words to start your next sales meeting. It doesn't mean you will use them but, hopefully, you will understand conceptually that, when you start a sales meeting, you need to sweep them into what is going to happen in the meeting with enthusiasm.

Now that you have just read this example, hopefully, you can't wait to start your next sales meeting by doing something very similar. In the laboratory of human experience over the past 35 years in coaching sales managers how to conduct productive sales meetings, we have found that there is something to be said for learning from best practices. There is also something to be said for learning from what not to do.

Don't:

• Start the meeting late.
• Start the meeting sitting down if you can stand up.
• Start the meeting by reading the agenda out loud with no eye contact with the sales team.
• Apologize for having the sales meeting.
• Start the meeting in a negative way, beginning with bad news or how sales are off.

We're sure that you have never started a sales meeting by doing any of these things that don't work. Once you have delivered the agenda with enthusiasm and your sales team is energized, you will move on to the next topic on the agenda – the opening inspiration. Keep in mind that the meeting started at 8:00 a.m. and it's now 8:02 a.m. and you're rolling.

Once you're very comfortable opening up the sales meeting the right way, and your team has bought into the sales meeting process, you may be ready to select one salesperson on your team to open the meeting with the welcome and overview of the agenda. To prepare your salesperson for this activity, refer back to Chapter 8. You will be the practice coach and use the six steps of explain, you demonstrate, practice, observe, give feedback, and they demonstrate before the meeting starts. When the meeting begins, you will observe them welcoming everyone to the meeting and overviewing the agenda. While that is happening, you will take notes. When the meeting is over, you will set aside time to deliver performance feedback and, if necessary, be the practice coach again.

Opening Inspiration

So, you've opened the meeting by welcoming everyone and overviewing the agenda. Ideally, you did it with an appropriate level of excitement and your team is feeling energized. Keep in mind that there are a number of things that could be going on in the minds of your sales team when they come to the meeting. One of the main reasons to do an opening inspiration is to redirect their thoughts from whatever they were thinking about before coming into the sales meeting and get them focused on the sales meeting in a meaningful way. It could be a story, a quote, a short video, a poem, a meme, a picture, etc. Here are some things that may be on their mind coming into the sales meeting:

• I need to get a summary out for my meeting last night.
• I need to prepare for my meeting today.
• My emails are backing up.
• I need to hit the phones today.
• Wow, that drive into work sure was tough today.
• Can't wait for the weekend, today is Friday.
• I'm not a morning person. I need another cup of coffee.

You will begin implementing the sales meeting process by conducting the opening inspiration yourself. Over time, you will transition this activity to members of your sales team. Be the practice coach prior to the meeting. Ask your salesperson what they are going to present and have them do a few dry runs on you prior to the meeting. The opening inspiration should be brief, about 1–2 minutes. Whether you do the opening inspiration or someone on your team does the opening inspiration, if it is short like a quote, you can actually place it on the meeting agenda that will be distributed prior to the meeting. After the opening inspiration has been delivered, you can generate engagement with the team by getting them to discuss with each other how the inspiration applies to them and the job that they do every day. You can do this in several ways:

• Select certain team members to share with the team how they feel the inspiration applies to them. “[Salesperson's name], please share with the team how this opening inspiration resonates with you.”
• If you chose the opening inspiration, you will go first and share what the inspiration means to you. After that, you will ask other members of the sales team what the opening inspiration means to them. “Hey team, let me share with you why I selected this opening inspiration and what I like about it. I chose it because… What I like about it is… [Salesperson's name], why don't you share with all of us what resonates with you about the opening inspiration.”
• If a salesperson chose and presented the opening inspiration, have them share with the team why they selected that inspiration and how it resonates with them.
• Have each salesperson find a partner and discuss what the inspiration meant to them, then debrief with the entire group. “Hey, everybody please find a partner, take a minute, and share with each other what that opening inspiration meant to you.” (Discussion takes place…) “Who would like to go first and share with us what you discussed with your partner.”

Your meeting started at 8:00 a.m. and now it's 8:07 a.m. and everybody has already been actively engaged in the meeting. Now it's time to move into success stories.

Success Stories

We are all storytellers. We all live in a network of stories. There isn't a stronger connection between people than storytelling.

—Jimmy Neil Smith

Because sales is a profession that can have disappointments and failures, it is important to keep your team focused on achievements and success. One way to do this is to share success stories at your sales meetings. These stories:

• Give your salespeople ideas from their peers on what's working.
• Motivate your sales team to start doing the activities they know they should be doing but are not doing.
• Reinforce activities they are doing that are producing success and inspire them to keep doing them.
• Remind them of activities they used to do but stopped doing and motivate them to start doing those activities again.
• Create an environment where your team is sharing best practices with each other.

One reason success stories work so well is that most people love to hear an interesting story. A well-told story has the ability to grab our attention, captivate us, and create a deeper connection. When it is done right, it can be a very powerful tool. Stories paint a picture.

Skills Development Training

Nice work. You have had an opening inspiration, and everyone has shared a success story. Your meeting started at 8:00 a.m. and now it's 8:22 a.m. and you already have two wins under your belt. Your sales meeting is already better than 99% of any other sales meeting that has been conducted so far this week. There has been inspiration, ideas, best practices, and successes shared, all within 17 minutes. Now it is time to transition into the next segment on the agenda, which is skill development training.

One ready-made opportunity to help your company maximize their investment in sales training is to reinforce and revisit elements of the training in bite-size pieces in your sales meeting. Adult learners learn best when they have been given a large body of information to learn, and then revisit it in smaller chunks over time. In doing so, the likelihood of them adopting, adapting, and implementing what they have learned increases. Because the sales meeting is regularly scheduled on the calendar, it is an opportunity to reinforce your company's sales process and methodology.

Think about what most likely has taken place in your company. There was probably some type of a roll-out of your sales process and methodology in the organization. Many of the senior leaders in the sales organization were probably thinking that a miracle would happen – every salesperson in the organization would have 100% buy-in, leave the training and execute the sales process and methodology flawlessly. It's almost like they think it is a software installation: load it and it runs. But what we have discovered in working with our clients is that this is typically not the case.

What we have observed that does work is implementing a sustainment plan that reinforces and revisits the sales training relentlessly. One of the best settings to do this in is a sales meeting, because most companies have consistent meetings. The driving force of this sustainment plan in the meeting is you. Either you are going to reinforce it in the sales meeting, or you're not.

Practice every time you get a chance.

—Bill Monroe

Goal Reporting and Goal Setting

A sales meeting provides an excellent opportunity to track goals because, when your salespeople report their goals in front of the rest of their peers, it adds an extra element of accountability to the process. It is a healthy way to share results and increase commitment to each other. It is important that you share and report how the team is performing against the team's goals so that every salesperson knows where the team stands in relation to the overall team goals. After that, each team member will report their individual goal, what they set out to do, and what they actually did.

There are multiple ways to conduct the goal reporting/goal setting portion of the meeting. Here are a few ideas:

• Have a scoreboard pre-populated with each salesperson's numbers, goals versus actual. Have each salesperson explain their numbers and provide feedback on what worked or didn't work.
• Have your scoreboard color-coded based on your team's results for specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that you want to focus attention on in the meeting. One important KPI that many sales managers focus on is new quality opportunities that go into the top end of the sales team's pipeline. The reason they put emphasis on this is because what goes into the top of the pipeline typically drives what comes out the bottom of the pipeline. For example, let's say you wanted to highlight the importance of identifying new opportunities with your sales team as the one KPI you wanted to emphasize in the goal reporting/setting of the meeting. Here is an example way to color-code results based on the KPI:
  • Green: exceeded new opportunity identification goal.
  • Yellow: met new opportunity identification goal.
  • Red: did not meet new opportunity identification goal.
  • Blue: personal best of new opportunity identification goal.
• Have a blank scoreboard ready and have each salesperson on your team walk up to the board and post their goals vs. actual, either before the meeting starts or during the meeting. This creates not only the accountability of them knowing their numbers, but also the positive peer pressure that manifests itself when they walk up in front of their peers and write their numbers on the scoreboard.
• Regardless of how you decide to do goal reporting and goal setting in your sales meetings, you can ask your salespeople questions when you are reviewing the numbers, such as:
  • What went well?
  • What led to your success? (when they exceed their goal)
  • What obstacles did you face?
  • What challenges did you run up against? (when they miss a goal)

Summary and Action Steps

Prior to the meeting, you will have selected one of your salespeople to take notes during the meeting and document any action steps that come out of the meeting. You will have them briefly review the notes they took and the action items agreed upon by the team. When the meeting is over, they will take the notes and email the sales team a summary of what happened in the meeting and any action steps to be taken. It is very important that everyone is clear on what is expected from them after the meeting. It also allows for no misinterpretation on what happened during the meeting and what is to happen next. You have just summarized action steps and it's not 8:55.

Next-Meeting Logistics

At this point, you will communicate the date and time for the next meeting. If you are at the point where members of your sales team are running segments of the meeting, you may want to announce or select who will lead parts of the next meeting. Now it's 8:57 a.m. and you're about to begin the closing inspiration.

Closing Inspiration

End the meeting with a bang. Just like the way you started it. Your salespeople should leave the meeting positive, motivated, and ready to make things happen. Now it's 9:00 a.m. and you had a great meeting. Go get ‘em tiger! ROAR!!!

Other Activities

Here is a list of some other topics that you could put on an agenda to add variety and value to your sales meetings.

• Case studies: Have a few members of your sales team come prepared to share the details of recent opportunities they have closed. How they got the meeting, how they closed the deal, and any issues, objections, challenges, or concerns they addressed in the process.
• Guest speakers: Bring in other key people from different departments in the company. For example, an operations director, customer service manager, chief financial officer, etc. You can also have someone come in from outside the company such as a product representative from one of your vendors.
• Senior management guest: Invite an area, regional, or divisional manager who may be in town to give an update of what's happening in the company.
• Book of the month club: Read a sales book as a team and discuss it at the meeting. You could assign different chapters of the book to different salespeople on the team as homework to lead a discussion in the next meeting.
• Deal diagnosis: Your salespeople share with each other opportunities that are stuck, stalled, not moving forward to the next step. Brainstorm ideas on what they can do to get the prospect to move forward.
• Pipeline updates: Have every salesperson on the team give a quick status check on their pipeline. This can be a little bit different from goal setting and goal reporting but it's another form of accountability.
• Competitive analysis: This is an opportunity for your sales team to share anything they've learned about the competition. Their strengths, their weaknesses, and especially why prospects decided to work with them as opposed to you.
• Subject matter expert speaker: Subject matter experts are a good source of product and industry knowledge. They can come from inside your company or outside your company. Ask them to share insights on their journey in the business and the industry as a whole, what their day-to-day work involves, their thoughts on the future of your industry, etc. It is very common to have multiple subject matter experts come in to speak as a panel.
• Bring your best idea: Have everybody come prepared to share a great sales idea such as an objection response, a discovery question, or a prospecting tip.

Most successful sales managers run great meetings. Their meetings are well thought out, planned, facilitated in an efficient manner, interactive, and positive, with successes shared and recognition given. They are perceived by the sales team as time well spent and the sales team leaves the meetings inspired and motivated. What we have attempted to provide you with in this chapter is a sales meeting framework that you can use to conduct sales meetings and, over time, delegate responsibility for conducting segments of the meeting to members of your team. There is also a list of other activities that you can use to add diversity of activity into your meetings. Think of this chapter as a sales meeting playbook. You can take this book tomorrow and open this chapter and use it as a roadmap to conduct your next sales meeting.