WHY SHORTER, SMALLER SALES MEETINGS RATCHET UP PRODUCTIVITY
If you’re a fan of the traditional, Old School, Hour-Or-More-Long weekly sales meeting, you’re going to have to swallow hard on this one. I’m about to share with you a way of looking at sales meetings that may be outside your comfort zone. I’m going to introduce you to the concept of the mini-sales meeting. If you implement it soon and stick to it religiously, there’s a good chance it will significantly ramp up the productivity of your sales force.
I think we can all agree on one thing: No salesperson likes sales meetings. And with good reason: they’re generally a waste of time and resources. As often as not, they’re also poorly planned, raggedly executed and deal with things that really have no business being discussed in front of everyone.
Notorious Sales Meeting Time-Wasters
Such as these usual suspects. How many of them have you trotted out at a recent sales meeting?
- Comparisons of individual sales performance – I’ll talk about this in a future blog but this Old School tactic motivates nobody except the one or two hotshots who are already atop the sales performance chart
- Rah-rah motivation – If you need to do this then, my friend, you have hired the wrong salespeople in the first place!
- Routine housekeeping – Even five minutes spent on this at a sales meeting means your sales force could have been on the street five minutes sooner
The Only Two Reasons To Have Sales Meetings
If you’re going to force everyone into a room once a week, you had better make it worth their time. Only two things do that because they’re the only two that will make money for everyone in the room:
- Brainstorming
- Focused training
For example:
Brainstorming This is NOT a general all-ideas-on-the-table bull session! If you know what makes a productive sales meeting, you know that planning is critical. So when it comes time to brainstorm, by all means include everyone but keep everyone on topic.
One good brainstorming topic is problem clients and prospects.
Here, you don’t do the old-fashioned circle-the-table and see who everyone is calling on this week. No value to that. What you do is ask each person to come prepared to discuss – in sixty seconds or less – a particular challenge that’s ahead of them in the coming week. This could be a cranky client who never seems satisfied, a hard-to-pin-down prospect or an advertiser who’s looking for a new idea that just hasn’t popped up so far. Ask for ideas, suggestions, past histories. Let everyone contribute but limit the discussion of each of these topics to five minutes or less.
Another way the group mentality can light up a sales meeting is solving a problem the whole station faces. Perhaps this has to do with branding or audience perception. Maybe ratings have dumped and advertisers need to be convinced to stay the course. The group brain is a great resource on topics like these – if it’s driven by you to stay on the subject.
Focused training
You don’t need to do formal sales training at every sales meeting. It does need to happen from time to time and only you – and your sales force – can determine when that time is.
Just remember what successful sports team coaches know about training:
- Focus each session on one item – and only one
- Practice repetitively until everyone is on board
- Involve more experienced players as mentors
- Point out to all how valuable this particular training is (in other words, how much money they can make!)
Apart from these two items, take five minutes each week with each individual salesperson to cover the performance and housekeeping issues that used to waste everyone’s time at a full weekly meeting.
Then turn ‘em loose to go sell something!
WEDNESDAY: Programing Quality Control vs. Nit-Picking
WEDNESDAY: Programing Quality Control vs. Nit-Picking
