Sales Meetings that Transform Sales Culture

Team sales meetings are a powerful tool for sales culture creation. Observe any team sales meeting and you know if that team possesses a high-performance sales culture.

Sales meetings and sales culture interact in a continual feedback loop. High-powered, productive sales meetings promote a high-performance culture, and a high-performance culture will enable even more productive sales meetings.

Characteristics of sales meetings that are conducive to creating a high-performance culture:

• Individual and team performance are recognized and celebrated

• Sales Training is focused on practical selling skills

• The meeting starts on time, ends on time, and has a clearly defined agenda

• The meeting leaves the sales team feeling motivated, recognized and equipped

Let’s dig into each of these elements a bit more.

Recognizing and celebrating performance is the first ingredient to effective sales meetings. Going into a sales meeting, an effective sales leader should have wins to celebrate for all key metrics. If your key metrics related to goals are Sales, Sales Growth, New Accounts and Gross Profit Percentage, then the leaders in Sales, Sales Growth, New Accounts and GP% should be celebrated. Recognize those that blew away their goals in these categories. Name the leaders for each of these key metrics. Celebrate the wins. Celebrate the team exceeding the team goal. High-performance sales cultures celebrate wins and recognize performance. Defeated sales cultures ignore performance in sales meetings.

Practical sales training is the second ingredient. Too many sales leaders fail to conduct any meaningful training related to sales skills. Instead, they allow the training segment of their meeting to be hijacked by a visiting manufacturers representative to conduct product knowledge training. It’s fine to also conduct product knowledge training, but part of every sales meeting should have the goal of improving or practicing one critical selling skill. Some ideas: role-play calling prospective customers to book an appointment. Role-play conducting a needs analysis or overcoming objections. Do “target practice” on a specific competitor by having the sales team brainstorm on all of your competitive advantages against that competitor. Give one sales representative the stage every month to demonstrate their presentation skills. Do a “Round-Robin” sales presentation where every team member gets to do a segment of a presentation. Practice closing the sale or practice doing a business review. If you focus on sharpening your team’s sales skills, amazingly, sales performance will improve.

Making sure the sales meeting starts on time, ends on time, and has a clearly defined agenda is critical. Sales professionals detest it when their valuable time is disrespected. Always start and end on time. It’s also critical to have a clearly defined agenda and to publish that agenda for the team to see at the beginning of the meeting. Three important elements of every sales meeting are: Recognition, Communication, and Training. I’ve already discussed Recognition and Training. Communication should be concise and clear. In the communication segment, you can announce a monthly or quarterly sales contest, communicate any changes in the company’s strategy as it relates to sales, make the team aware of new products, and communicate any opportunities in the market. Always keep communication positive and solutions-focused. Even if the topic is distasteful, like the dreaded “price-increase” keep the team focused on how to communicate this in a positive way to customers and on positive potential outcomes.

The best way to tell if your sales meetings are successful is by how the team feels when they leave the meeting. Do they feel motivated, recognized and better equipped to achieve their goals? If so, then it was an effective sales meeting. If they don’t feel these things, then it’s time to consider how you can change your sales meetings to make a positive impact on your team’s sales culture.

Good selling!