While they are usually mandatory, sales meetings can be anything but productive. Often times, team members don’t feel very inspired or get much out of sales meetings. That’s why it’s so important to focus meeting around your primary goal: helping your team to make money.
Meetings can be very productive if presented in the right ways. While company policies and the like are good to refer to now and again, these things should not be on your list when gathering your sales team for a meeting.
Here are some tips for things not to do while in a sales meeting:
- Don’t arrive late. This is just proof positive that you don’t take the sales meeting seriously. Most people do arrive late to meetings which just push everyone’s day back. The focus here is on being productive. Being on time for meetings is a start.
- Do not take or receive phone calls. Everyone is busy and everyone is expecting to hear from their most important people, but all phones should be silenced during meetings, with only the most urgent of calls a reason to step out of a meeting momentarily.
- Do not wander off your agenda. It’s easy to get sidetracked, particularly when someone initiates a complaint or other dialogue. Do not let these become the center of your meetings. There is a time and a place for sales team intervention like this. Your sales meeting is not the place.
- Don’t come unprepared. Know what the focus of your sales meeting will be about. Come fully prepared, which means you will have to put together an itinerary of important topics you will be discussing.
- Don’t be negative or condescending. Figure out what conditions have been in place during the team’s greatest successes, and figure out how to do more of what works best. Focus on what works well, and don’t use sales meetings to make lower performers feel insecure or inadequate.
Sales meetings should be all about helping team members develop and improve sales skills and sales techniques. Sales meetings should help team members to develop sales strategies for upselling and dealing with rejection. It’s all about the development of your team into the polished, directed, goal-oriented professional crew that will make your company shine.