An important part of B2B Sales is conducting sales meetings with your sales team. Sales meetings should be about accountability, inspiration, motivation, and education for the sales team. They should have clear and attainable objectives that every person on the sales team understands.  According to Atlassian, 91% of workers daydream during meetings while 73% use this time to do work, and 39% admit that they have fallen asleep in a meeting.  These statistics do not necessarily reflect that meetings are a waste of time.  These statistics simply reflect that many meetings do not hold value to attendees.Salespeople often feel like anything that takes them away from their prospects and clients is a waste of time.  HubSpot reported that salespeople only spend about a third of their time engaging buyers and roughly 12% of their time (or about 19 hours a month) sitting in meetings.  Nobody wants to only spend a third of their time doing their job.  Everyone wants to feel productive.  Therefore, conducting sales meetings that foster inspiration, motivation, education, and accountability should not detract from productivity but increase productivity.   

Steps to conduct a productive and engaging sales meeting: 

Start with a clear purpose.  

A sales meeting should drive action. 

To drive action a sales meeting should focus on: 

• • Accountability: Review team goals and set new targets.  Discuss prospect and client feedback.  Resolve any outstanding issues. 
  • Inspiration: Share wins and lessons learned. 
  • Motivation: Uplift and help your team with a “can do” attitude.  Brainstorm new sales tactics and solutions. 
  • Education: Train the team on modern sales skills, and conduct role plays.  Salespeople are competitive, so consider making a role play competition. 

Create and follow an agenda.  

We have all attended meetings without agendas, where it is simply a free for all to communicate, especially for those with the loudest voices.  These types of meetings are simply unproductive and do not ignite action.  The agenda should include the reason for the meeting; key talking points; decision to be made; length of the meeting; and what materials participants need to bring.   

Items on the agenda should include: 

• • Deal statuses 
  • Outreach and activity numbers 
  • Progress on outreach 
  • Discussion on next step actions 
  • Share wins 
  • Share mistakes (Learning from each other’s mistakes is invaluable.) 
  • Discuss the sales pipeline and goals. 
  • Problem solve and have a brainstorming session.  (This could be in relation to marketing or industry trends, for example.) 
  • Conduct training on sales processes, skills, software, etc. 

Set clear expectations. 

Make sure everyone is prepared for their meeting, including their reports and questions.  Foster discussions and activities and create an atmosphere where it is a “safe” place for participants to speak and to be heard. 

Recognize and share prizes.  

Recognition is a prime motivator to sell more, as well as receiving praise.  Show through illustrations the earning potential with your latest sales campaign.  Create friendly competition in the team by offering “free lunch” competitions.  For example, if you have a sales campaign surrounding a new product service, offer a free lunch or bonus to the first sale of the new product or service. 

Reflect the culture of your organization. 

For example, if your organization focuses on making your client or customer the priority, the sales meeting should reflect the same belief.  Salespeople are generally competitive in nature, but if you want your team to work together, you must foster a team environment.  Recognize and give praise to your team when they work as a team, not just when individuals reach goals or milestones. 

Remember that a sales meeting is valuable to salespeople when the meeting drives action.   

What to discuss in sales meetings: 

• • Prospecting 
  • Developing great questions 
  • Handling objections 
  • Qualifying buyers 
  • Building trust 
  • Analyzing needs 
  • Uncovering value 
  • Differentiation (Unique Selling Proposition) 
  • Closing sales 
  • Pre-call planning 
  • Understanding personality styles 
  • New and existing product/service training 
  • Promotion training 
  • SQL development 

If you want to your team to feel motivated, then you must motivate them, not just by setting goals or competitions, but by setting the tone.  Start meetings with motivational music or quotes.  Jim Catchcart said, “Become the person who would attract the results you seek.”   

Never leave a sales meeting indecisiveness or without a game plan.  In the spirit of conducting a sales meeting, I leave you with one actionable item:  Implement at least one these suggestions in your next sales meeting and witness a difference in engagement.