This week's Monday Sales Blast is all about that good old standard,
the Monday morning sales meeting. How relevant are those meetings,
anyway? And what do your salespeople really think of them?
For some stations, a regular sales meeting is a valuable event that
leaves everyone rarin' to hit the streets. At many others, however, the
weekly sales meeting is a mind-numbing waste of time.
In this Sales Blast. I'd like to take the liberty of quoting from...myself.
The following is an excerpt from my new book, The Zero Turnover Sales
Force: How To Maximize Revenue By Keeping Your Sales Team Intact
(details follow this article).
And I quote...
WHY SALES PEOPLE REALLY HATE SALES MEETINGSNothing was ever sold at a sales meeting. Why then do so many of them blotch the agendas of the people who should be the most productive in the organization? And why do sales people hate them with such virulence?
When I talk to sales people (as opposed to sales managers) about sales meetings, here’s the opinion I almost universally receive: they’re a waste of time. Why? The reasons are many and varied. Take a look at this list of common gripes about sales meetings. Have you been part of a meeting any time recently where none of these occurred? If so, you are lucky, indeed:
Schedule hassles – “The meetings always seem to happen just when a hot prospect wants to see me”
Disorganization – “Why does it take an hour to cover something that’s worth maybe ten minutes?”
Irrelevance – “This has nothing to do with the reality of what I’m doing.”
Rambling – “The boss goes off on every tangent imaginable or gets into involved discussions with one or two people that have no bearing on the rest of us, who just sit there.”
The last three of which combine to form:
Preparation – “Did he know he was running a meeting this morning? If he has to shuffle through his papers or ask someone to go to his office to find something he forgot one more time, I’m outta here.”
And…
Importance – “If these meetings are so !@#$%^& important, why doesn’t she seem to have the time to put them together right?”
Interruptions – “Cell phones, texting, people interrupting other people and trying to dominate the meeting.”
Rah-rah sales meetings – “Don’t try to motivate me, help me sell more. I was motivated when I came here. Now, I’m just tired.”
And its companion…
Phony baloney fun and games – “Really, do grownups need to play these little ‘fun’ games to get motivated? The boss seems to think we do. Wrong.”
The Humor Factor 1 – “The sales manager thinks she’s funny. She isn’t. Boring.”
The Humor Factor 2 – “The sales manager is a too-serious, self-important dweeb. Lighten up!”
Why not just tape a target on my butt? – “They make everyone talk about their individual sales totals, which inevitably puts the spotlight on those who are struggling or
just going through a soft spell. Humiliation in front of my peers isn’t much of an incentive.”
Thank you, Mr./Ms Negative – “All we hear are complaints. You’d think the whole sales staff was a bunch of slackers. What a great way to start the week!”
And one of the most inexcusable management failures:
Time limit? Oh, THAT – “Bad enough that we have to carve out an hour every week for this drivel, now we’re way past that. I have calls to make and people to see!”
Unquote.
Think hard about your weekly sales meetings and how they're run. And if you come from sales, remember what you thought of sales meetings when you were working the streets.
My book, The Zero Turnover Sales Force: How To Maximize Revenue By Keeping Your Sales Team Intact is available in hard cover from AMACOM, the publishing wing of The American Management Association. It's at most Barnes & Noble and Borders locations. If they're sold out, you can find a copy (including for Kindle) at www.amazon.com.
