Recently I wrote an article on sales meetings that generated a lot of interest “Eleven Ways to Make Sales Meetings More Effective”.
Based on the feedback and comments it seems that at regular meetings all over the country, too many sales managers still do all the talking and the sales team still do all the listening or in some cases just sitting there being bored and disengaged - resulting in a lose-lose outcome; a team of grumpy demotivated sales people!!
Group Discussion
In conducting sales manager coaching I challenge my clients to make their meetings more valuable, more interesting and ultimately more effective; for them and their team. They do this by introducing a regular subject for group discussion; a subject each week that it important to their business, their clients or the development of their team.
The response is amazing with comments such as “I have never thought about introducing this type of thing to my meetings” or as another manager said “the guys love this stuff”.
The Topics
Below are 26 topics you might like to use to spice up your meeting (that’s one per fortnight). Try it and then compare it to what you currently discuss……the weekly numbers, the latest management announcement, who missed budget, how bad the economy is, yaddah, yaddah.
Ideas to avoid discounting our rate (or price)
What is Client Focussed Selling?
15 great questions to ask a new prospect
The best ways to maintain communication with a current client
Cold Calling v Warm Calling. What’s the difference?
Ideas for effective key account management
Making our sales meeting more effective
The top 5 attributes of the best prospect for our business
The importance of a social media presence for sales people
The sales pipeline - is it really a factor in sales success?
Tweeting a daily idea to the client base
Best responses to our most common objections
Are role plays important to our skill development?
What mistakes have we made recently?
Our 3 main competitive advantages
The best sales & management books to read
Team SWOT (or company, product or customer service)
Recovering lost (or lapsed) clients
What I’d do if I was sales manager for a day
My favourite business (or sales or training) blog
10 great questions to ask our current clients
The things our customers dislike (or like)
Creating an effective 30 second introduction (or elevator pitch)
Is needs based selling fact or fiction?
The best training course I have ever attended
Recent news items (or online articles/blogs) our clients should know about
Free Plug
By the way if you’d like a copy of the original article “Eleven Ways to Make Sales Meetings More Effective” or want to know more about the implementation process for these topics, how to format the discussions, tie them back into key learnings and create more effective team meetings contact me at: [email protected]
Excellent article, Stephen! Your sales meeting is an opportunity for dialogue, learning and consensus. Too many Sales Managers have their own agenda for the meeting. If you have the attitude that the sales meeting is the property of the sales team, you will be much productive. Your Salespeople will actually tell you that they enjoyed the meeting. That's better than waiting to get out. Thanks for posting Stephen.
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