Sales Meetings That Produce Sales

Sales meetings are an efficient and effective way to accomplish a great deal with your sales team, yet meetings in general are still the most maligned business interaction. Why? Participants don’t see the relevance and many meetings are poorly conducted.

“When I bring in my entire sales team for an hour it costs the company close to a $1,000 in per-hour wages to have them sitting in a room listening to me,” observes David Snodgrass, president, Dennis Seven Dees Landscaping, Portland, Ore. “When you factor in the additional cost of lost selling opportunities as well, it really starts to add up to a big number. I make sure that every meeting I lead is planned, prepared and presented in a way that gives us a high return on this investment!”

A little preparation can go a long way to eliminate “meatless meetings” – i.e. they have no substance and the only thing they make you want to do is “meet less.” I have trained sales managers to conduct more meaningful sales meetings across the country using a simple, powerful 5-step formula.

All it takes is attention to a few important details. Your most important function as a meeting leader is to create an atmosphere that is conducive to high-level, positive participation. Here is how to accomplish that using the S.A.L.E.S. formula. In the end that is what sales meetings should lead to-more sales.

S –  SUCCESSES.
Get your meeting off to a great start by sharing and celebrating successes, either individual accomplishments or team wins. There is a ton to learn from the achievement of goals, small and large. Success leaves clues that can lead you to future successes, and the way to value and affirm winning performance is to celebrate it. Celebration is always about everyone; people do not accomplish anything in a vacuum, so the ripple effects of public praise for achievements reaches far beyond what the eye sees.

“I really value the success reporting we do at our meetings,” says James McFeley, Artvark Maintenance. “It not only informs others about what projects people are working on, it inspires and teaches the rest of the team about what works. It is like a mini training program every week.”

A – ANALYZE THE NUMBERS.
 Goal achievement revolves around scorekeeping. Positive scorekeeping is the key that unlocks performance improvement. It gives everybody feedback to begin problem solving so downward trends in performance are short lived. It also gives cause to celebrate so high levels of self-esteem and motivation are sustained.

Because, typically, there is emotional charge around the numbers, it is important to frame it as a detached “business analysis tool.” Work through the initial resistances by disciplining yourself as the sales manager to ask for everybody’s report every week. This is high-level, positive accountability.

The numbers give every sales professional a snapshot each week of the state of their business. They tell you, the sales manager, what results people are getting from the resources they have at their disposal. For example, a sales lead is a resource and a signed proposal is a result. For any company to be profitable, there is an optimal resource-to-results ratio that needs to be sustained. In other words, one sale for every three leads is an example. Then you can look at activity levels for further input. If your sales professional is closing one out of every four leads (below acceptable minimum) but is seeing 25 appointments a week, that points you toward additional skill training. If he or she is closing one out of every 1.5 leads, (a 66-percent closing rate) but is still below the monthly revenue goal, that probably points toward increasing activity.

Its just business! Numbers tell you how to run a clean business.

L – LOOK FORWARD.

Noted linguist and psychologist Richard Bandler once commented: “The best way to accurately predict the future is to create it!”

Help your team predict the future by actively planning with them on a regular basis.

“My design sales staff know that they are expected to bring their daytimers into each meeting,” McFeley explains. “This simple planning process helps us focus on the week ahead and what we have to do in order to give us the best chance of succeeding. We pretty much have all the info we need. Everybody knows their goal, our business analysis report tells where we are relative to that goal, and our calendars give us a good picture of what we have set up and what we need to do to bridge the goal gap.”

E – EDUCATE.

A primary value of meetings is the efficient dissemination of information. The content for this part of your meeting can range from company notices to new company policies to production status and schedules to specific skill set training. You can bring in an outside speaker, someone from production, have the sales professional “best at getting referrals” deliver it. “We always use ALCA’s ‘safety faxes’ to take our safety program to the next level,” Snodgrass shares. The goal is simply to have people know more and be better at something meaningful to them.

S – SEND THEM OUT INSPIRED.

How you end the meeting is important. When you end it is equally important. End on time! It models good time and project management and sends the message that you value the time of the talent in the room.

Encourage “future project” success for everyone and make a motivational closing talk, however brief that is. Send people out more confident, more competent and more inspired.

Certainly, there is more to running a meeting than these five key points, but this a good start. Logistics like time and place might seem fundamental but are important. Using a pre-published agenda is valuable to help prepare people and keep everybody on task. Start on time! Don’t punish the people who exercised good time management by delaying the meeting. Be careful about scheduling around breaks or lunch times. Competing with hunger and/or food for people attention is a losing battle.

Having said all this, you don’t need to be a professional meeting planner or speaker to run a productive, profitable and enjoyable sales meeting. A little bit of good planning goes a long way.

Clifton Pieters’ latest book for landscape professionals titled "SHOW ME THE PROFITS: Closing More High Margin Sales With Powerful Referral Selling Secrets" is available through the Lawn & Landscape site. Pieters can be contacted through his Web site and by phone at 503/492-0548.