How to Make “Time” for Timely Sales Meetings

1. Hold regularly scheduled meetings. Meetings need to be held often enough to keep sellers at top performance. Cars need oil changes every 5,000 miles, how often do your sellers? Weekly meetings with a purpose are still the ideal.
2. The time with your team should focus on what is most important – help them sell more to reach (or exceed) their goals and energize them. Many meetings default to “sharing” of numbers, product updates, operation issues, or process changes. If there is a lot of “sharing” needed, narrow it down to the basics for the “live” time together. Use other means (handouts, emails, etc.) to share the nitty gritty details.
3. Focus on different “times.” Past, Present and Future are all important. Most meetings I have observed focus on the past and the present -- more of that “sharing” of information. A meeting becomes timely when more focus is on the future – equipping your team to sell more, get in front of more people, and build their confidence and competence to exceed quotas.

When Alice Kemper was a sales manager at Harte Hanks Communications, she broke her 60-minute weekly sales meeting into 45 minutes of training and 15 minutes of need-to-know information. Her results speak for themselves. “Our team had less turnover and higher results that many of the other teams,” she said. ”And each time a new branch was opened, the new manager-to-be was selected from my team. That time investment was a strategy.”

A guideline: Break whatever meeting time you have into:

·         10% focused on the past (sales results, wins, losses, etc.)

·         10% on the present (current promos, operations updates, etc)

·         80% building for the future

For a 60-minute meeting that’s about 10 minutes of what happened, 10 minutes of present information and 40 minutes to help them capture more sales in the future!

What do you do to ensure your sales meetings are timely? Let us know in the Comments section.