Salespeople prefer more productive meetings. They hate attending and sitting through them because this can lead to a phenomenon known as “meeting fatigue.” These not-so-productive meetings can affect both salespersons and cause a massive blow to the entire company’s revenue. According to Pumble, unproductive meetings cost businesses $34 billion annually, which continues to increase.
As a sales lead, you want to be someone other than the one who allows members to have meeting fatigue or causes the company to incur losses due to constant unproductive meetings. You must understand how to set up impactful sales meetings to avoid these issues.
This article is a guide showing how to get more sales meetings as a team leader.
9 Tips to Make Your Sales Meeting More Productive
1. Make the Meeting Convenient:
Scheduling a convenient sales meeting is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome when working with different people. While some of your team members may prefer the meeting on a Monday morning to start the week on a fresh note, another might feel Monday morning is too busy because they have to follow up on leads, make sales appointments, return prospect calls, etc. You might even have a team member who prefers a virtual call to a face-to-face meeting and another who loves giving face-to-face presentations.
As a sales team leader, you must consider each team member’s preferences before scheduling a meeting. According to Pumble, 76% of employees prefer meeting on a specific day or time. Understanding the most suitable time and place for everyone before conducting a sales meeting helps you schedule a convenient meeting for every member.
Setting a convenient sales meeting helps to increase the chances of attendance and reduces last-minute cancellations.
2. Define the Meeting’s Objectives:
After determining a convenient time and place for your sales meeting, the next step is to set clear objectives.
Sales meeting objectives are precise points that help you set measurable goals to be achieved at the end of the meeting. They define the meeting outcome clearly and can be used to measure the meeting’s productivity. Properly defining your sales objective is one of the best practices for sales meetings, as it helps you create a sales meeting agenda that aligns perfectly with your goals.
Whether you aim to close deals, review sales team performances, or brainstorm strategies, having well-defined objectives helps you plan appropriately for a sales meeting setup. That means every action point on your sales meeting agenda should focus on achieving the set objective for the meeting.
3. Create a Sales Meeting Agenda:
Your sales meeting objectives give you a clear vision of what you want to achieve at the end of the meeting, but how will you accomplish these things? That’s where a meeting agenda comes in.
The primary aim of a sales meeting agenda is to ensure that every part of the meeting objectives is encountered. Your sales meeting agenda serves as a guide or direction for achieving the goals. It provides the meeting attendees with a vivid picture of how the meeting is going.
A sales meeting agenda also helps sales team members to save time by avoiding unnecessary discussion. An agenda can be structured this way:
● Meeting schedule.
● Introduction and Welcome (5 minutes).
● Current Challenges and Goals. (15 minutes)
● Suggestions and solutions (30minutes)
● Action point (5 minutes)
You must also share the meeting agenda with your team members before the meeting. This helps them prepare beforehand and ensure that the discussion is within the meeting objectives.
4. Start on Time:
Sales reps are extremely busy people. One way to save time is to start and end sales meetings on time. Starting your sales meeting on time helps set a specific professional tone for the meeting.
When you start your scheduled sales meeting on time, you allow the agenda to flow smoothly without rushing or skipping any vital aspect. This helps enable detailed discussion around your product offering, clients’ needs, and potential solutions.
It is one thing to schedule a sales meeting on time, and it’s another to ensure your team members are punctual. You can ensure their punctuality by incorporating a “start on time” culture among your team members and offering incentives for punctuality.
Starting and ending sales meetings on time helps you communicate indirectly to your team that you respect and value their time.
5. Encourage participation:
A sales meeting becomes productive when ideas are contributed, and problems are solved. This can only happen when all sales team members are encouraged to show their potential and creativity in sales meetings. To promote the active participation of all team members, you must create an environment where everyone feels comfortable enough to participate.
Encouraging active participation is a fantastic strategy for setting up sales meetings. As a team leader, you must craft creative ways to ensure that even your team’s shyest person is actively engaged. You can create an interactive meeting by incorporating brainstorming challenges, Q&A sessions, short interactive games, etc. This can help every team member loosen up and feel safe enough to drop contributions and engage actively.
However, you must also draw a line between ensuring active participation and wasting time on unnecessary things.
6. Recognize Achievements and Setbacks:
Another way to have a productive sales meeting is to make your you note past achievements and setbacks. Recognizing and appreciating your team’s accomplishments helps you set a positive tone during the meeting. It helps your team members know that their sales efforts are noticed.
According to Apollo Technical, 92% of workers are more likely to repeat a specific action after recognition. For instance, if a team member successfully surpasses a set sales target and boosts sales metrics, highlighting that progress during the sales meeting will help the team member feel appreciated and motivate others.
It is also equally important to highlight major setbacks the team members face. This helps the team learn from mistakes instead of shying away from them. When a particular setback is underscored during a sales appointment setup, team members can work together to solve that setback or roadblock.
7. Stick to Schedule:
Before the meeting, you must have created an agenda that allocates time to discuss each item. Sticking strictly to schedule helps ensure all items in the sales meeting agenda are properly addressed without unnecessary delays.
When you stick to the schedule of your sales appointments setup, you successfully eliminate distractions and help other team members keep the discussion within the agenda.
Sticking to schedule shows meeting attendees that you have a sense of accountability and deeply value that they took their time to attend the meetings. Remember that salespeople are busy people. Instead, They would gather sales leads, meet with prospects, or close deals rather than sit in a meeting all day.
One way to ensure you stick to a schedule is to assign a timekeeper for the meeting. The assigned person would monitor how long it takes to address a particular item on the agenda. The timekeeper would alert the other members of the team when the allocated timeframe for a discussion has elapsed.
8. Keep Meeting Minutes:
Because of the many topics addressed, it is easy to forget some key points discussed in a sales meeting. That’s why you must note everything that happens during the sales meeting.
A sales meeting minute is a written document that captures everything said. This includes tasks assigned to sales team members, attendees of a particular meeting, etc.
Taking minutes can also ensure the division of labor in a sales meeting. As a team leader, you cannot lead the sales meeting and still document the meeting minutes. Assign a team member to take notes of the meeting using some sales tools and a recorder.
9. Clearly Define Action Steps:
Make sure you end the meeting by delegating precise tasks to team members, indicating what they should do in preparation for the next meeting. This would include how they would gain sales leads, talk to prospects, or solve a problem brought up in the meeting. A well-defined action step would be needed to determine what occurs in the following sales appointment setup.
Final Words
Anyone can organize a meeting, but not everyone will ensure its productivity. As a sales team leader seeking good results, you must understand how to set impactful meetings.
Start by having a well-defined objective to help you create a solid agenda that you and your team can follow to have insightful discussions that lead to solving problems. Also, ensure active participation during the meeting to allow your team members to deliberate and brainstorm. Make your sales meetings a safe place that allows for collaboration to ensure the growth of your team.
Hire a B2B appointment setting company to help set up the sales meetings with the right decision-makers.
