The Sales Meeting: Waste of Time or Advancing Your Strategy?
By Joe Calloway
Does the Meeting Advance Your Strategy?
From this moment on, you should never have a sales meeting that doesn’t advance your strategy. This is no subtle shift. It’s a snap-your-head-around change from holding a meeting because “It’s our weekly meeting" to “We use the meeting to advance our business strategy.” What a difference!
Meeting for Meetings's Sake Is Over
What communication, learning, team building, etc. is needed to catalyze the progress of your sales strategy and vision? Without that context, it’s easy to wander off into the weeds, distract yourselves, and waste time.
When everything about your sales meeting is intentionally designed to answer the question, “How does this help us advance our strategy?” an interesting thing happens: all activity becomes grounded in an outcome and a clear context for why you are doing it in the first place.
Simplicity and Accountability
Boil down your approach to sales meetings to some simple guidelines: How will the event accelerate your strategic progress, how will the event be designed to achieve it, and what are the evidence points that you succeeded. If you can’t be specific on your answers here, there must be no need for a meeting. Be unforgiving in this regard because all outcomes are directly related to the quality of the inputs and design.
The bottom line: the movement of meetings for meetings sake to meetings as strategy is one of the greatest leverage points available to leaders focused on achieving results as quickly and effectively as possible.
Sales meetings are, for most companies, a hidden asset that they rarely take full advantage of. The fact is there is no form of communication – no ezine, no newsletter, no email, no poster, no video – that can realize the power of a shared vision more effectively than simply bringing your people together.
Don’t waste this asset. Design and execute your sales meetings with fully intentional leadership. Know exactly what you want to accomplish and how you are going to advance your strategy with the opportunity of your next meeting. And if you’re having a meeting just because “it’s that time again” – don’t. Save everybody’s time and money and wait until you are focused and purposeful. Invest the time to plan and design an event that will make a significant difference in your business.
Top Eight Sales Meeting Mistakes
1. Having a meeting just because you always have a meeting.
2. Going into the meeting without stated objectives and a clearly defined outcome
3. Putting more focus on what leadership wants to say rather than what the team needs to hear.
4. Overloading the agenda without giving participants time to network, process what they’re hearing, and discuss action steps.
5. Focusing on only one mode of communicating (i.e. a podium parade of talking heads) as opposed to looking at multiple ways to communicate and engage the audience.
6. Poor coordination and communication between/among speakers, resulting in conflicting messages or unnecessary repetition.
7. Making no provision for building on the meeting’s objectives and goals after the event.
8. Structuring the meeting so that the audience is completely passive, not allowing them to interact and affect the meeting and its content.
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