7 Tips for Successful Sales Performance Meetings

You're hosting meetings with your team to improve sales performance, but they never go quite as planned. Time runs over, attendees are focused elsewhere, and there's always that one employee who hijacks the meeting. You're beginning to think that sales meetings are just a waste of time.

When meetings are executed properly, they'll help foster rock star results from all of your employees.

What Sales Meetings Accomplish

Sales meetings are an excellent way to stay on top of your sales team's performance. They are like creative jam sessions. In addition to keeping you aware of their goals, meetings also:

• Create a safe space to communicate issues: Give employees the opportunity to air grievances and rather than defending your position, just listen. "We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve." - Bill Gates
• Identify where changes need to be made: If you wait until quarterly numbers are in, you may waste time with practices and procedures that don't work. Checking in regularly will help you identify and fix these issues before they make a dent in your sales performance.
• Teach sales skills and best practices: Continuing education should be a part of every sales team.
• Change perspective: Bring in employees from other departments, customers willing to share their experience, or experts to dive into specific topics. This will help create mini-mastermind groups and identify vulnerabilities and solutions faster. After all, none of us are as smart as all of us.
• Celebrate successes and failures: Meetings are the perfect time to highlight employees meeting their goals, and stepping out of their comfort zones for the good of the company.
• Encourage your employees to work as a team: Your sales team is like a band and in order to make beautiful music, they need to learn to play together. As Robert Plant once said: "I owe everything to the musicians I work with."

How to Have an Effective Sales Meeting

The benefits of sales meetings far outweigh the negatives. These tips will help you make the most of your time.

Schedule Regular Meetings

When you call an impromptu meeting, it can throw your employee's schedules off kilter and cause resentment among the team. Even worse, employees often feel like they're being called into the principal's office and that they did something wrong or are about to get bad news. This puts people in defense mode. No way to start a meeting.

Create an Agenda

When a band plays a gig, they have a set list ahead of time. This gives them the opportunity to practice and prepare for the performance. When you create an agenda and distribute it to your team in advance of the meeting, they know what to expect and can come prepared with any numbers, concerns, or questions that pertain to the meeting.

Be Clear About Your Purpose

When you plan and execute your meeting, stick to under 3 major points for discussion. Any more than that and your message will get diluted, your employees will get confused, and any calls to action will be ignored.

Stick to the Schedule

Set a non-negotiable start time and a hard end time for the meeting. Your employees are busy people and no one needs to lose an afternoon to a sales meeting that's gone rogue.

Don't Allow Solos

You are probably already thinking about the guilty employee. They monopolize the floor, go off on tangents, and don't let other employees, or you for that matter, get a word in edgewise. One way to handle this is to provide "Tangent Flags" to meeting attendees. If someone hijacks the meeting, anyone in the room can wave the Tangent Flag and bring the meeting back to order.

Create a Technology-Free Zone

Unless you intend on having attendees utilize their phone or iPad during the meeting, ask that they leave it at their desk. This will cut down on distractions and keep your employees focused on the discussion.

Be Choosy About Who You Invite

There's nothing worse than being forced to attend unnecessary meetings. It would be like having musicians on stage who aren't playing anything. Decide what personnel needs to hear and weigh in on your message and let the rest of the employees continue on with their regularly scheduled jobs.

As Marvelless Mark® says: "Your business, just like the music business, isn't rocket science, it's Rock-It science." Regularly scheduled sales meetings done right will help you create the rockin' results you are looking for from your sales team.

Mark Kamp® aka Marvelless Mark® works with organizations who want their teams to achieve immediate rock star results. A Keynote Speaker/Entertainer/Author, Husband, Father, and child of God, his primary message, “Opportunity Rocks®” gives attendees a fresh new perspective on Sales, Marketing, and Employee Performance. Fun and engaging, Mark combines the success secrets of your favorite rock stars with just the right amount of entertainment to transform your employees into business rockstars. Learn more at www.OpportunityRocks.net.