Have you ever sat through a pointless meeting and calculated how much of the company’s money was being wasted on individuals sitting around a table completely zoned out?

Sales meetings in particular are an important tool for helping you to keep your team’s performance on track. Effective sales meetings don’t just happen, and improving your meetings isn’t just a case of ordering drinks and a plate of muffins. Successful meetings require a range of skills, a disciplined approach and an effective leader.

Here are some handy tips on how to prepare for and conduct effective sales meetings so that you and your team get the most out of them.

How often should sales meetings be run?

The regularity of when you run sales meetings may vary depending on your specific work environment, the geographic spread of your sales team and the nature of the work that you do. However, generally speaking in most sales environments, it is important to have a weekly and a monthly sales meeting as a minimum. This certainly provides a strong foundation and can be supported effectively by individual and regular sales coaching of both a formal and informal nature.

In addition, your meetings may vary depending on when they run.

The weekly meeting – focus on:

• Go through previous week’s results.
• Share in successes of previous week.
• What do we want to achieve this week?
• Key actions required before next meeting.

The monthly meeting – focus on:

• Go through previous month’s results.
• Share in successes of previous month.
• What sales results do we want to achieve?
• How do we go about achieving them?
• Changes, improvements and innovations.
• Sharing of knowledge and information (individual presentations; could include product, process, market, customer info).
• Review current sales objectives, confirm if still relevant and adjust if appropriate.
• Re-link focus to overall sales goals, strategies and performance targets.
• Key actions required before next meeting.

Preparation for the sales meeting

Gathering team results and reconfirm or redefine sales targets. Notify people of the meeting with plenty of notice. Often it is best to organise a standard day and time when you meet. This creates consistency and sets expectations.

Running the sales meeting

1. Always start and finish on time. Reward people who are on time by starting the meeting as scheduled. When you wait for latecomers you penalise those who have arrived on time – and you inadvertently reward those who come late.
2. Stick to the agenda. A meeting is held for a purpose, so keep its main objectives and desired outcomes clearly in mind at all times. Be prepared with handouts, questionnaires, overheads etc. Distribute the agenda several days before the meeting. The agenda is considered a commitment of what will be covered, by whom and for how long. Most salespeople complain that meetings have no agenda and it goes nowhere far too slowly.
3. Announce the successes. Take a few minutes to congratulate and thank the people who are contributing, meeting goals and closing deals. Get them to tell their successful sales stories to the group so people can learn from their experiences. Make sure you share this around from meeting to meeting. A person who may be struggling can still have some successes, so encourage them by having them share their successes too. What you pay attention to will grow – catch them doing something right!
4. Make it fun (while still being professional). If you are not creative on the fun-making side of things, assign fun to one or two of your sales team who are. Take advantage of the creativity of your people. This will cause some anticipation throughout the meeting.
5. Get staff involved. Have a Timekeeper, a Notetaker, a Whiteboard writer and a Presenter.
6. Good meetings have leadership; bad meetings do not. The success of a meeting will depend largely on your ability as chairperson to get things done efficiently and to reach group decisions in minimum time. Reflect on the questions below in relation to how your role as chairperson affects the outcomes of your sales meetings.

Avoiding the ‘zzzzz’ factor in sales meetings

Check your meeting format:

• Is the style of your meeting a good match for the personality of your team or is it just a match for your own personality?
• Have you spent time reflecting on the type of rapport or atmosphere you want to create in your meetings?
• Do you tend to conduct meetings in the fashion you do simply out of habit?

Reflecting on these questions will provide you with an appropriate direction to take to ensure you and your team are engaged and gain the most out of your meetings

I confess, like most sales people I do not like – no I hate – paperwork and administration, because in my experience most of it is unnecessary.

Aggh! I hear some people say “information is vital for any business”. Yes it is, but not all of it. What information and how much of it do we really need?

As a sales person I do know the importance of information. It allows me to be focused when getting on the phone and out into the field to find more viable sales opportunities. I am focused on who I need to contact, how I need to contact them and how often I need to contact them to get the type of customers and sales I want for my business.

I have goals and targets set, I know my market and how I need to sell to them, I know what products and services I can sell and at what price, I understand my competitive advantage and value proposition, I aim to clearly understand my customers’ needs, I have proposal or quote templates I can use when putting forward an offer or solution to a prospective customer.

I use PR, marketing and contact campaigns to help drive more leads and new business, I liaise with other team members who get involved with project delivery to ensure they understand the brief, I provide accurate data to our bookkeeper for invoicing purposes.

With the right information I am prioritised and focused on my job. I value information, and I know I need to make time for information management.

I clearly understand that the capture, distribution and management of the right information is critical to my job and the outcome of any sale. Getting the right information to the right people is important in my job, my staff, my clients and my peace of mind.

However, anything that blocks or gets in my way of doing my job effectively is frustrating. Too much unnecessary paperwork/data management can easily erode hours of my valuable selling time if I am not careful. We can all get hooked into filling out this and that, and suddenly you find it is the end of the day and you haven’t made a prospecting phone call to anyone – Missed Sales Opportunities.

The information age can be a huge advantage, but also a huge trap for sales people.

With the advent of CRMs (customer management systems), data capture and management can be made so much easier – well almost. I do value database management systems. We use one ourselves and if used properly they can be an amazing attribute to any business and sales person’s job.

However… too many businesses believe that sales automation will solve all their problems.

In fact some companies have tried to eliminate their sales forces altogether (in the vain hope they can automate sales completely) only to find that it didn’t work. Now maybe some businesses have cracked it, but I am yet to find one. I am yet to see the complete automation of customer acquisition and retention for businesses.

So as far as I know it, nearly every business needs someone working in a proactive sales role if they want to make money. And salespeople should invest their time at what they do best – selling.

However I am seeing an increasing problem of too many salespeople spending too much time managing data on CRMs when they should be out prospecting and selling. They are falling into the trap doing too much paperwork, or should I say CRM work. They look very busy, but on closer inspection they are just shifting around bits of information and not making sales.

There can be two main reasons for this:

• They are hesitant and fearful of making contact with prospects, so data base management or paperwork is an easy way out to look busy (this is usually due to a learned behavioural and attitudinal issue that can be addressed by cognitive behavioural techniques – another topic for another time).
• The expectations set by management around data capture and management paralyses the sales team and holds them hostage to the CRM. Classic “paralysis by analysis”.

If your sales team is spending too much time on their CRM filling out data, and not enough time in the field or on the phone with customers, then you probably missing valuable sales opportunities.

I mean how much information do we really need? What it the right information to capture and manage? It all depends on your business of course. I like to keep it as simple as possible and the basics could include:

• Size, type, potential and value of customer – their buying patterns, market potential and history including sales volume, margins, product mix, etc.
• How they came to your business – via lead, referral, direct marketing, direct prospecting, etc.
• Prospect lists including type of prospect, type of contact approach used and outcome of contact.
• Competitors – how many of them, how you are positioned against them, what they are doing with whom, etc.

The thought of having to fill in forms and details for the sake of it leaves me cold. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that key customer, market and competitor information must be captured and stored for tracking and account management/development/penetration purposes. I also understand that in this networked world data is paramount to any business – let’s just make sure it is the right data though.

CRMs are at risk of paralysing sales forces.

Sadly, sales people are often not consulted on what they want in a CRM nor are they involved in buying the CRM software. Even worse, many CRMs have been designed without little or no consultation with sales people. We often find CRMs slow, cumbersome and arduous to use, with no apparent links to clear sales KPIs – not what you want when you are a fast moving on-the-go sales person.

Advice from some William T Brooks, author of The new science of selling and persuasion is:

• Build or buy customer acquisition and retention engines (aka CRMs) that are simple, easy to use and provide meaningful information linked to relevant sales performance criteria.
• Work on cost reduction initiatives using technology that doesn’t turn sales people into data entry clerks.
• Never allow digital solutions to dominate a sales force’s life or curtail creativity or productivity.

So beware of competing motivations! It could really cost you.

The 20^th century approach of one-upmanship, although still encouraged by many traditional sales managers, seems to be slowly retreating into the shadows of the past as crude and old-fashioned. Polar opposite to the latter, but just as unproductive, are the approaches of:

• A whining puppy (pleading for a sale trying to make customers feel sorry for you).
• A chameleon (always bending and twisting yourself to fit any situation, often losing yourself in the process).
• A parrot (not adapting your approach enough to suit the style if the client).

These approaches often annoy customers and elicit pity rather than trust.

Too many sales people (in particular those new to sales) feel they need to pretend to be someone else or be something they are not. We find many sales people still stick to a “one size fits all” repertoire and find it difficult to adapt their style to different client situations and styles, often finding themselves hiding behind the veneer of brand or concepts (think “walking talking brochure”).

Or worse, others twist themselves into all sorts of shapes just to please the client. The biggest trap I see many sales people falling into is the trap of trying to be liked – at any cost. They end up doing anything to be liked including giving away product or margins which costs them and the business money. Clients (consciously or not) can see through the pretense and never feel quite able to trust you because the “real” you did not show up or stand up for who you are and what you represent.

These aspects featured in my research project Sell Like a Woman. Here is what some of the women had to say:

• “As a sales person you learn to reflect each of your clients, but at one stage in my sales career I felt as if I was loosing my identity, from constantly twisting myself out of shape to fit other people’s ideals. I then started to bring more of me into my interactions with clients, rather than changing myself to suit them. I have found that clients respond well to the more genuine me and I now feel more sure of who I am in the situation and therefore more capable of establishing boundaries and orchestrating the transaction.”

• “I struggle to work with people who I clash with either ethically and from a values perspective. I realised this a long time ago and do not enter into these types of relationships personally or professionally.”

• “{Effective sales people] posses a good deal of honesty and approach me like an intelligent person. Those sales people who ‘talk down’ or treat me like a ‘woman’ (e.g. buying a new car) rarely get a sale. Even if I know which car I want to buy, I may go back to the dealership but ask for a new salesperson.”

Our sales research is showing that you need a variety of repertoires you can use with different clients – that is, be more professional and business like with some; more friendly and relaxed with others or more quiet and reserved with yet other, however it is evident that clients still want to deal with the real you. Knowing how to modulate and adapt your approach is vital in any sales situation but knowing how to still remain as “you” is equally as important.

One way I have found very useful in ensuring I am operating authentically for my client and myself is using the skill of verifying. It is very useful when trying to understand another person’s situation or point of view. Verifying your customer’s needs requires the combination of three key communication skills; listening, paraphrasing and clarifying.

Verifying can be a useful technique to ensure the message has been received and understood by both the sender and receiver. Verifying involves paraphrasing or summing up in your own words what you think the person has communicated.

People with good verifying skills:

• Paraphrase (sum up or rephrase) what is being said.
• Use questions – to sum up or clarify.
• Empathise with the other person.
• Encourage the speaker to continue – nod, murmur brief words of encouragement.
• Concentrate on what is being said.
• Really take in what is being said, not making judgements as they speak; pay attention with their whole manner – body, eyes, facial expression.

We all need to have skills and boundaries to guide us in our endeavours and preserve our integrity and the integrity of others. Verifying is one very useful skill to have in your repertoire.

NOTE: Recognise that you will not get along with everyone you come across. There will be times when you (unintentionally) elicit unpleasant feelings in others. Not because of what you said or did, just because you may remind him or her of someone they knew whom they did not have a good experience with for instance.

Don’t take it personally. It can happen to us all, however, if you try to twist yourself into a shape that doesn’t suit you then just to please them or get them to like you then you both suffer. Remember to remain true to yourself and be respectful of yourself and others. There are plenty more fish in the sea.

Ever had some customers who spend very little with you but take up enormous amounts of your time? Nothing’s ever right, they quibble about every cent and they do not intend to spend much with you anyway.

Or those customers who are really nice and you get along with them very well, but you know they do not have the potential to develop into long-term revenue generating accounts for your business.

What do you do? You need sales, but at what cost to your business? These types of customers, in effect, keep you from working with customers where you can get a better return on investment.

Segmenting your customers and your market and then working out the most cost-effective way to sell and service these customers is a very good idea. We have all heard of “ABC” accounts. As being the best, Bs the next, and so forth.

One way I have found useful when segmenting my customer base is to identify the POTENTIAL they have to do a range of business with me over a period of time and then look at the VALUE in terms of revenue and profit they can bring.

Q. What defines a high potential, high value customer for your business?

A. Someone who is doing a lot of work with you and has the criteria to do

more work with you in the future. These are your premium accounts and should

be looked after with great care.

Q. Who should you go after next?

A. The customers or potential customers who display the characteristics of high potential, but low or no value to your business. Someone who is doing a little or no work with you and but satisfies the criteria to do more work with you now or in the future.

So what does it cost you to get a sale? And are you prospecting in the right area to give you and your business the best return?

Surprisingly some sales people do not know the answer to these questions. In particular, when people start out in business, many do not think about their markets nor about prioritising their sales efforts. If this happens they can find themselves making sales but at a cost to their business.

Depending on the industry, it costs an in-field sales person and their company anywhere from $500 to $1000 per client sales meeting. Given this cost you would want to be very discerning about; (a) how long it took you to get a customer on board and (b) about the value and potential of the customer could give your business.

If you look at your market you can see that you do not want every sales opportunity. However, don’t mistake getting a small sale with a high potential low value customer as being a waste of time – these type of sales can be the “thin end of the wedge” to much larger sales, and if nurtured can lead to more sales down the track.

What I am guarding against is trying to sell to those customers who do not and never will meet your criteria for high potential and high value. In sales it is just as important to know when to say no and walk away. It’s about how you use your time and effort.

Most people in SMEs are time poor and chasing after sales phantoms is time consuming and potentially exhausting. If you think a potential client sales meeting is going nowhere and will lead to nothing for you, then exit – but gracefully. Don’t ditch them, instead be pleasant and state that you are not in a position to help them and that someone else may be better suited to give them what they need.

Make sure you have other referrals or sources handy that you can give them. A good idea is to tee up those referrals before hand and know where you sit relative to each other in the market. This way you will leave on a good note. And you never know where those customers may turn up in the future. They could turn up somewhere else and be the right kind of client for you then.

Alternatively, if you come across customers in who are low value and low potential in relation to your current sales structure and effort – that is, it’s too expensive to sell to them – then a telephone sales person maybe the right level of sales effort required. A telephone salesperson costs a business less and can be used to make smaller and more frequent sales. Then again if that is too expensive you may be able to use online ordering to sell and service them.

Defining and understanding your target market is integral to sales planning as it allows you to determine where you will get the best return on investment from your sales efforts.

So scan for the right criteria of what viable prospect/customer looks like for you. If not properly evaluated, many sales meetings can become very expensive cups of coffee.