5 Essential Sales Meetings to Boost Your Team's Performance
Time is currently the scarcest resource in the professional world.
Specifically in sales, time needs to be spent on core activities, mainly selling.
Today, I want to discuss sales meetings, including how to structure them, their goals, and the frameworks to use for success.
This includes the meetings you should hold and why, but most importantly, how to make them productive for your team.
If you are a people manager or work in a sales team, you likely have multiple team meetings scheduled at the moment.
As someone with a fractional career who works with multiple companies simultaneously, I have seen firsthand the flaws, challenges, and disconnection that a poorly executed team meeting can cause.
Many managers struggle to effectively manage their team's time.
One reason for this is that team members often don't see the benefits of attending so many meetings.
This is especially problematic for sales teams, and even more so for remote ones.
If team members disengage during a sales meeting, productivity, goal attainment, and overall success can suffer.
If you put ten people in the same (virtual) room and they come out uninspired, then you've got a serious problem on your hands, my friend.
Sales meetings are often perceived as time spent, when in fact they should be viewed as time invested.
I have personally run hundreds of sales meetings and attended even more as a sales rep.
Over 15 years, I have observed both good and bad practices and have developed a successful formula for my team's sales meetings.
Cutting down on the number of meetings is not the solution, as it can disengage team members and result in a loss of control.
However, overloading the team with meetings is not ideal either. The key is to strike a balance.
Here below are the five meetings that every sales leader should have with their team.
1. Sales Meeting
Frequency: Weekly
Duration: 60 mins
Suggested day: Monday
Goal: pass key messages, check on the team morale, remove roadblocks, give updates and keep communication open.
Structure of the meeting:
Outstanding points from the previous session (2 mins).
Important Updates (5 mins)
Main KPI’s round-up (5 mins)
Main topic (20 min)
Road blockers from the team (5 min)
Celebration (5 min)
Next step & Action Items (5 mins)
2. One-to-One’s (1:1’s)
Frequency: Weekly
Duration: 30 mins
Suggested day: Mid-Week
Goal: uncover personal or professional issues and prevent attrition and bad performances. Help and give support. Coach individually.
Structure:
How are you? (5 mins).
KPI’s round-up (5 mins).
Main topic (10 min)
Feedback (5 min).
How can I help? (5 min)
3. Sales Coaching
Frequency: Weekly
Duration: 60 mins
Suggested day: Thursday afternoon
Goal: learn altogether and align the team on your sales playbook.
If 1-2-1s are the most important meeting for individuals, Sales Coaching is the most crucial team meeting.
There are multiple structures, my favourite is the ‘Open Floor Coaching Session’.
Meeting structure:
Select a critical moment in the sales cycle, such as “How We Run a Demo”.
Ask for a volunteer to give an impromptu demo or talk about their approach to running a demo.
Ask someone else for feedback and input every 2-3 minutes or during a crucial point.
Conduct the discussion openly, without muting anyone. Encourage everyone to contribute and brainstorm together.
The sales leader serves as the moderator.
Document the takeaways, add them to your sales playbook, and share them with the team afterwards.
4. Forecast Review
Frequency: Weekly
Duration: 30 mins
Suggested day: Monday afternoon
Goal: Deal support, forecasting.
During this meeting, we will focus solely on deals.
It is important to ensure that all deal-related information is up to date in the CRM before the meeting. Each deal should have its amount, closed date, and next steps updated.
During the meeting, ask each team member to review 5 deals that are expected to close within the same month, and answer the following questions:
Why are they interested in buying?
What problem are they trying to solve?
What factors could prevent them from closing the deal within the estimated timeline?
5. Celebration Time
Frequency: Bi-Weekly
Duration: 30 mins
Suggested day: Friday afternoon
Goal: End the week on a positive note with your team, build a stronger culture, and release some steam.
Have everyone enjoy their drink of choice while celebrating the top three individuals from the previous weeks.
Choose three topics, such as:
Top Activities
Best Demo
Team Player
Give a symbolic prize to the top performers, such as an Amazon voucher if you have the budget or a LinkedIn recommendation.
In Summary
Sales Meetings are very important. However, they have to be productive and inspiring.
You have to be crystal clear about why those meetings are executed and prepare for each of them in advance.
Here are the 5 meetings you should schedule with your teams:
Sales Meeting
One-to-One’s
Sales Coaching
Forecast Review
Celebration’s time
This Week’s Action Step
Take a moment and ask yourself:
How many team meetings have you scheduled? Do you have many or few? What is the structure? Is your team engaged?
Additionally, every month, ask your team for feedback about those meetings. Find out which meetings they want to keep, improve, and why.
Weekly meetings are key to improving team performance and steering trajectory.
Your team will appreciate the effort but most importantly you will see engagement going high and eventually also your achievements.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week! Ciao!
