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.

3). 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.

photo credit: IAEA Imagebank via photopin cc

You arrive early for work. You are eager to make sales calls. But before you dial your first client of the day, someone turns to you and says “Don’t forget – we have a sales meeting in a few minutes!”

Your heart stops for a second. All of a sudden you realize that your entire morning is going to be shot to hell. All those clients you hoped to call that morning will probably be contacted by your competitors. And while you’re sitting in the meeting, drinking coffee, and trying to stay awake, your competitors are laughing all the way to the bank.

The sales meeting. It’s one of those rituals we all encounter in our careers. But do those meetings really have to be so bad? Can’t we make them more productive so that you can do what you were hired to do – get sales.

Of all the companies that I’ve ever worked for over the years, only a handful of employers offered productive and thoughtful meetings. The meetings were only 30 minutes long and would be held around 8:30 a.m. or earlier. You had a clear idea of what the meetings were about. Everyone respected each other’s time. Most salespeople got to the point. Why? Because they wanted to quickly return to their desks to make money.

However, those companies were the exception rather than the rule. Most meetings that I have attended have little or no agendas, turn into bitch sessions with salespeople complaining about another department, or about each other. While some people may look at sales meetings as a welcome break from doing sales, I usually look at them as an interruption to my selling process.

I’ve attended some meetings that ran so long I almost wanted to slit my wrists. I’ve heard stories over the years how some sales managers would come up with creative ways of reducing the length of meetings. For example, there would be no chairs in the meeting room. Everyone was forced to stand. Coffee or smartphones were not allowed. They would adhere to a very strict agenda. While not related to sales, I heard of a restaurant manager who had a creative way of reducing his weekly meetings with his staff. He would hold the meetings in the walk-in freezer. The meetings didn’t last very long.

While attending a quarterly meeting of my local food co-op, the board actually hired a meeting coordinator who acted as a referee. If someone got off-topic or got into a shouting match (which happens often), she would step in, enforce the meeting rules and the agenda, and move the meeting along.

In the next few posts, I will provide videos from YouTube on how to conduct sales meetings. I will then provide you with my own tips and advice.