If sales meetings were not mandatory, would your sales team even bother showing up?
In fact, most sales managers don’t actually hold productive sales meetings (even though most they think they do). They instead, assemble the sales team together regularly, often leading the meeting with quota updates and sales reports.
It is important to remember that the purpose of a sales meeting is to help your sales team make more money. Additionally, it is about equipping a team to grow its personal income. The primary focus of a sales meeting should be the team itself, not the company, its products, or the customer.
Here are five taboos to avoid in sales meetings:
1. Policy: Don’t waste time reminding the team that it is not allowed to use the bathroom in the executive suite or expense a dog-sitter when they’re on a business trip. Instead, make the sales rep pay for the dog-sitter.
2. Procedures: If your team members consistently leave certain fields blank in the CRM database causing headaches for order processors, send an email with the consequences.
3. Paperwork: Sales people are notorious for filling out time sheets and expense reports incorrectly, if at all. Resolve this with offenders privately. However, if they are top performers, get them an administrative assistant. Super stars should be busy selling, not doing data entry.
4. Products: Product training deserves its own session. On the other hand, how to sell the product makes for a great sales meeting. Work on identifying features and benefits. Develop good questions to ask prospects, discuss how to overcome objections and seek out ways to differentiate.
5. Pestering: Managers shouldn’t ask why sales team members aren’t making quota, in a sales meeting. Instead, they should offer solutions to these issues by role-playing, coaching and equipping their sales reps to improve performance.
Remember, sales meetings equal sales development. So topics should include:
– practicing sales skills
– teaching new sales techniques
– facilitating discussions about lessons learned in the field
– developing strategies for overcoming stalls and objections
– role-playing how to upsell to an existing customer
– practicing referral selling
