Sales meetings can be challenging. You have to go over goals, share promotional plans, review metrics, touch base with your team, and ensure everyone stays on the same page. While this is a lot easier with smaller teams of less than 30 people, it becomes more difficult with a much larger group.
Luckily, we found a way to scale effective sales meetings for a team of hundreds—or more: Implement the following 6 proven strategies to take control of your meetings and maximize success.
Warm up the Team
Before diving into tough subject matter, it’s best to get people connected to the team and break the ice. This energizes participants and acts as an intangible incentive that rewards punctuality and motives team members to be on-time.
What kind of warm-ups are appropriate for sales meetings? Whatever works for your team! Warm-ups can range from simple interactive games, ice-breaker stories, shared successes, or quick project or challenge. This may involve some trial and error, but finding warm-ups that resonate with your team and keeping them in rotation can be an effective way to build enthusiasm that lasts through the meeting.
Stick to Basics
When managing a meeting for hundreds of people, you’re also managing their time and, in turn, their productivity. Look over all topics to be covered during the meeting and get rid of anything that isn’t crucial. A good tip is to assess each item and decide whether it’s truly meeting-worthy, or if it can be saved for a quick email or bulletin.
Take Control of Small-Scale Updates
With a small sales team, individual sharing time can be easily managed and typically doesn’t last too long into the meeting. If the same time were allotted to each individual within a meeting full of hundreds of team members, the meeting could last all day.
Keep three important points in mind to use as guidelines for individual sharing:
- Implement an appropriate time limit
- Set up a theme for sharing to follow
- Maintain control; anything over the time-limit or not thematically related can wait.
Maximize Motivation
Motivation can take an underperforming sales team and blossom it into a group of top performers. Why? Because motivation is the driving force that connects goals and productivity and turns them into results and profits.
One of the best ways to motivate sales-driven team members? A little healthy competition, of course! Using the right competition technology can create a fun team-building activity that serves as both motivation and a helps reinforce top learning take aways.
Enhance Skills
If we were to ask you “what is the goal of your sales meetings?” what would you say? Is it to simply relay information? To motivate team members? Both?
When it comes to your meetings, the goals you set for each are derived from your team’s specific needs. That said, ensure you’re also addressing what your team lacks, as well. By creating opportunities for training and education, you can help strengthen your team and enhance their skills, leading to better productivity and more sales.
Stick to the Plan
The last strategy to execute a successful sales meeting simply involves tying the previous five aspects together. With your team in mind, plan an agenda from warm-ups to skill-building activities that covers their needs and the needs of your company.
An important tip for creating an agenda: make sure to either hand out copies or post it somewhere accessible for each member to get a feel for the meeting and the activities involved. This can help keep both the sales team and meeting coordinators on the same page and allows for a much smoother experience.
At Option Technologies, our innovative solutions take sales meeting from boring to dynamic. Not only do our solutions enhance motivation, they also promote adult learning, retention, and team member participation during meetings and conferences.
To see how Option Technologies can help you plan a successful sales meeting, contact us today and one of our expert meeting technology professionals will help get you started.
