How to conduct sales meetings, Part 4

In the previous posts, I shared with you 4 videos from experts offering their advice on how to conduct sales meetings. Below are my tips to help you conduct better sales meetings –

1). Have a clear agenda. As already discussed in the previous posts, everyone should know in advance what the meeting is about. Stick to the plan. If people have an issue to discuss outside the agenda, encourage them to meet privately with the sales manager.

2). Fridays are normally the best time to hold sales meetings. Why? Depending on the industry you are in, Fridays tend to be the slowest sales day of the week. Fridays are also a good time to quickly review the week, and prepare for the following week. I knew one manager who purposely scheduled meetings on Friday afternoons so that his sales staff would not leave early for the weekend. In one video, it was suggested having three meetings a week. Frankly, depending on your industry, I don’t think this is necessary and could be overkill.

sales meeting3). Try to keep the meetings no more than 30 minutes long. Longer meetings tend to make people daydream, get bored and tired. It also eats into your prime time sales calling time. Let’s face it – you only have so many hours in the day. Unless you have clients all over the world (and I’ve been in the situation a couple of times), where you could literary work 24/7 and always have prospects to call, your time is very limited. Use it wisely.

4). Do you really need to meet every week? Can you hold the meetings biweekly? Or, as suggested in one video, schedule meetings only when necessary.

5). Will the meetings help the sales process? Will the meeting help salespeople do their jobs better? If the answer to both questions is no, then stop having the meetings or develop a better agenda.

As the old saying goes, time is money. Meetings take up a lot of time. Think carefully about what you do and say before scheduling a meeting.

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