How to Design Powerful & Productive Sales Meetings

It is the sales management’s responsibility to be a good shepherd of corporate resources, so spending money without expecting a measurable return is not good business. Every high-performing salesperson who attends a meeting will be thinking, “Is this meeting making me money, or is my time being wasted?” A company’s high performers will usually produce at least 60 percent of the company’s revenues, so when sales managers waste top salespeople’s time with poorly designed meetings, they send several negative messages: (1) that management is not considerate of employees’ time (high performers know that time is money), and (2) that management does not understand the business, does not know what needs to be done to increase sales, and is wasting corporate resources.

If the sales team begins to suspect that management doesn’t know how to increase sales, morale will be negatively affected and team members will question their choice of employers. Additionally, salespeople are conscious of the way management spends its money, so seeing waste during ineffective meetings degrades their confidence in the company and makes them less considerate of protecting the corporate resources under their control.

Unproductive meetings also signal to salespeople that management is not committed to excellence—and powerful sales people don’t want to work for companies like that. They want to make money, they want to focus their attention on that goal, and they want to work for managers who are committed to being the best.

With so much at stake in a sales meeting, how can we ensure that the meeting will bring value to the sales team and produce sales? The answer is simple, but the implementation is not: Managers need to develop a statement of strategic intent for the meeting, along with defined, time-sensitive metrics that will be used to measure the meeting’s success. For example, we might say that the strategic intent of our meeting is to train reps to sell X product, with the goal of 80 percent of them exceeding quota within thirty days of the meeting and maintaining that performance through the end of the year.

The challenge in developing a statement of strategic intent is in knowing what needs to be accomplished in the meeting to reach the required performance goal. The specifics must be laid out, and an aggressive but realistic performance goal must be defined. Carrying out this process takes a deep understanding of the business, the sales force, and the competition.

Because managers who can’t write these strategic statements and goals generally do not understand the business, this process can also be used by executive management to evaluate the effectiveness of managers charged with designing the meetings. In other words, this statement of strategic intent is useful for ensuring powerful results meetings and as a management evaluation tool.

Powerful sales meetings driven by statements of strategic intent and clear objectives are at the core of powerful companies. Management teams that hold them regularly will always stay on top.

John R. Treace has over 30 years experience as a sales executive in the medical products industry. He spent over 10 years specializing in the restructuring of sales departments of companies that were either bankrupt or failing. Investor groups and venture capital firms hired him to manage turnarounds of pre-IPO companies. In 2010 he founded JR Treace & Associates, a sales management consulting business. He is a member of the National Speakers Association and earned a BS in Psychology from the University of Memphis. Treace is the author of the new book, Nuts & Bolts of Sales Management: How to Build a High-Velocity Sales Organization. For more information, please visit www.treaceconsulting.com.