Sales Meeting Best Practices: How To Prepare For Success

Routine sales meetings are a crucial part of ensuring your team stays on the same page and meets its goals. However, if done poorly, your sales meetings may be doing more harm than good.

It’s true- if your sales meetings aren’t following these best practices outlined below, your team members may end up disinterested, bored, or unwilling to participate as their focus shifts to wasted time that could be spent selling and working with clients instead.

To ensure this doesn’t happen to you, read on and discover the sales meeting best practices that will keep your team engaged and successful.

Demonstration

When you replace lengthy lecture-style meetings with hands-on demonstrations, it helps to engage your team and explicitly show them new tips and techniques to use with clients. Demonstrations don’t need to be one-sided either. If a specific rep has had success working with one sales method, it can help to have that rep demonstrate his method to the rest of the team.

This also doubles as a way to celebrate and highlight success throughout the team, and can do wonders for building friendly competition, communication, and a sense of community.

Professional Development

Sales meetings are often a missed opportunity for professional development. By using this time to train and provide your team with new information, you help them grow not only professionally, but personally as well. Even more, when you use the right technology for the job, technology that improves adult learning and retention, the results can be phenomenal.

This is also the perfect time to address and correct areas in which individual members or the team as a whole may be struggling, but in an informal community meeting without the pressure and worry of embarrassment. This helps build and strengthen company culture, which can far outweigh strategy on the sales process.

Engaged Motivation

When combining demonstration and professional development, you create a recipe for successful motivation. The more motivated your team is, the more confident they are in their roles, the more productive they will be, and the better they will perform.

As mentioned above, engaged motivation is also a way to strengthen company culture, which in addition makes your sales team happier, more communicative, and also more productive.

Next Steps

It can be difficult to decide just how to implement the main three best practices into your routine meetings; Luckily, we also have the following efficient tips to strengthen your meetings and help you quickly implement the best practices above.

• Variety - Change the way meetings are presented from time time. Consider alternating between demonstration, education, and motivational meetings to keep them interesting.
  
  
• Keep Time in Mind - Keeping to a schedule is highly important, especially in sales. Your reps have clients and customer to attend to as well as goals and quotas to meet. Knowing their meetings won’t intrude by running over their allotted time will help put the team at ease.
  
  
• Establish a Purpose - By ensuring each meeting has a set goal and purpose, team members won’t feel as though meetings are time-wasting activities. The perfect purpose for a sales team can be competitive motivation. Consider technology to measure competition during the meeting as a way to highlight and reward top performers.
  
  
• Plan it Out - Creating an agenda and handing it out at the beginning of each meeting can also give team members a greater sense of control and an idea of what to look for. The extra prep can go a long way.
  
  
• Take Action - Don’t just adjourn your meeting and call it a day—motivate your team members to try something new they learned during the meeting as part of their goals for the day. Encourage follow-up questions throughout the week as well, in order to to promote community learning and increased retention.
  
  
• Encourage Participation - Using adult learning technology that gets your team involved in the meeting not only boosts engagement but learning and knowledge retention as well. Plus, it doesn’t have to be boring. Try dynamic learning games as a way to get your team involved, competitive, and enthusiastic during meetings.

At Option Technologies, we know how to do meetings, and how to do them right. If you’re ready to take control and make your meetings work for you, then contact us today and let our expert meeting technology professionals help you get started.