The most important hour of your week

Here’s something that’s a little scary.

If you’re a sales leader, the most important hour of your week is your sales meeting. Having your entire team together is your chance to excite, applaud, and do one of the most important things leaders need to do today – sell (and re-sell) your team on the power of your products.

But here’s what’s scary. Most AE’s tell us that they think their sales meetings suck. They think they’re horrible. People sit in the same seats every week. The agenda is totally predictable and pretty boring. There are too many non-sales people in the meeting. A huge % of the time is spent on housekeeping or other forms of minutiae, and the salespeople hate them.

How can you make the most important hour of your week a lot more effective? Here are 15 tips to make your sales meetings better, based on our observations of the best leaders in our business. Hopefully, a few will resonate with you and help you make yours better.

1. (Essential) Plan your meeting in advance. But not just 20 minutes before the meeting. There are a lot of high-priced people in the room for this meeting. Look at the average hourly rate x 10 people and this is an expensive hour. Make it worth their time. Schedule time on your calendar on Friday afternoon to plan a GREAT sales meeting for the next week. Don’t wing it!!!

2. Make your meetings fun. Play music as people gather. Celebrate last week’s victories. End the meeting with a video clip of a great motivational speaker. (There are hundreds on YouTube).

70% of your team test as Socializers/Expressives. Their principle motivation is APPLAUSE… EXCITEMENT… FUN. Give that to your team and combine it with accountability, and you win big.

3. Never have a meeting last over 1 hour. (Your group will love you for that!!)

4. Keep all non-selling people out of the meeting (production, traffic, promotion). This is a SALES meeting. If you feel like you need some communication from them, do it with an email or for 5-10 minutes at the beginning of the meeting. Then ask them to leave.

5. Remember the old adage, “praise in public, criticize in private.” NEVER have the “beatings will continue until morale improves” meeting. That destroys any chance to have a high-performance culture.

6. Regularly have elements in your meeting that sell the power of our products. Sharing client successes is huge. Having everyone bring in their favorite Super Bowl ad of all time a few weeks before the game is a great way to showcase the power of TV.

7. Bring your meetings off-premises 4-6x per year. How about a sales meeting at a client who’s had huge success using your products. The client shares their success and you have a meeting that excites people about your product AND is not the typical boring meeting.

8. Try standing to lead the meeting. Watch the energy in the room go up.

9. Let your team members lead parts of the meeting. This is a great way to get them some exposure. Maybe have AE’s take turns introducing a 10-minute training element to the meeting.

10. Don’t be predictable. Remember that great spring day in college when the professor moved the class outside? Salespeople HATE to be bored.

11. Make sure you convey your vision… over and over again. “Our team is going to be the best sales staff in our company.” What does that look like? What are the specific ways we’ll be measured? Don’t think that because you said it last week they remember. Frequency is as important in leadership as it is in advertising.

12. Make the launch of a new product or the launch of a critical revenue initiative like football a big deal. Remember, your job is to sell them so they can go sell a client. Get them excited! Whatever you do, don’t put on a meeting where you say, “OK, guys, here’s this year’s football package.” What does that do to get people excited?

13. The best time for sales meetings? The team wants Tuesday so they can socialize on Monday morning. But mornings are your highest % closing time. Don’t keep people off the street during the highest closing time. For that reason, you want your sales meeting to be on Monday morning. HOWEVER, a planned meeting on Tuesday is better than a lousy, ill-prepared meeting on Monday.

14. Change seats at the meeting. Every once in a while lead the meeting from the middle of the table.

15. “You can’t jump a dead battery with a dead battery.” Our job is to transfer passion and energy about our products and the difference we can make for clients. If your energy is off, how will you ever get your team excited?

As we lead our people into the new era of TV/Digital sales we have to understand that creating energized and focused sellers is critically important. Your weekly sales meeting is the #1 device to lighting the fuse to make that happen.

Let’s stomp out crappy sales meetings and replace them with meetings that get people fired up about our company and our products.

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Have a GSM or GM meeting in your future? Why not have Jim Doyle or John Hannon speak to your meeting about how to turn your sales staff into a Sales FORCE? We promise powerful, thought-provoking content customized to your company’s needs. Contact Jim Doyle at jda@jimdoyle.com or call 941-926-SELL.