Sales staff meetings can evoke a lot of responses: excitement over sales targets being met and the time for handing out recognition; apathy over giving or anticipating the same rah-rah speech from company leaders; dread over how unrealistic the expectations are or how stale the meetings like this may be perceived. The very idea of meetings may be seen by some as a necessary evil — we all know we need to talk about what’s going on, what problems need attention, and more. But sometimes it can seem pointless or futile because nothing ever seems to get done or the same loud voices tend to dominate. Humans being what we are, meetings may never be known for perfection. But the direction of your meetings can always be improving. In fact, just five simple tips may help turn your sales staff meetings into even better events employees look forward to and enthusiastically participate in.
- Publish a meeting schedule and stick to it.
Ad hoc meetings are, at times, good and necessary. But meetings that follow a published schedule or cadence are better. Scheduled meetings, of course, allow for longer-term planning and therefore remove excuses for missing or not being prepared. If your sales meetings include tracking of revenue and goals and such, try to schedule them as soon as possible after that data is available.
Your sales meetings may need to be scheduled on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. Do what’s right for your team, but make sure the meeting stays focused according to its intent. Weekly meetings should be limited to weekly topics, monthly to monthly, and so on. Knowing the meeting cadence (and overall purpose) allows for participants to have the right expectations as well; they’ll know the significance of the quarterly meeting and can put quarterly topics on that agenda.
Your team may also benefit from a daily (or almost daily) five-minute “stand-up” meeting. It’s literally a meeting that lasts five minutes where everyone stands up for the duration. Meant for quick check-ins or very short-term goal setting or tasks, the five-minute stand-up is also a great opportunity for a daily motivational word. Put this one at the very beginning of the sales day and it can set a helpful tone for the hours that follow.
- Always have an agenda.
In fact, publish this rule: If there’s no detailed agenda, there’s no meeting. The goal here is not merely to eliminate meetings that don’t have an express purpose, although that’s a good idea in and of itself. It’s also to make meeting leaders take the time to clearly express, in advance, what the purpose of the meeting is for, what topic(s) will be covered, who’s responsible, and other expectations.
Agendas should be realistic — an appropriate amount of topics for the time allotted — and account for a time for questions and answers. Better to cover one topic well and finish a meeting early than to cover multiple topics poorly.
Some meetings can have standing agenda items: confirming the date/time of the next meeting, recording the main agenda topic for the next meeting, and even making time for some kind of recognition or praise.
- Require in advance a written paragraph on each agenda item and circulate it to the participants before the meeting.
This may be the most complex and yet most useful tip for effective sales staff meetings, as it increases clarity on the purpose of the agenda, requiring thoughtful focus and summarizing of what’s needed or intended. This exercise not only helps those who need more time to process decisions but also slows down the quick thinkers who tend to vocalize possible solutions. In short, the meeting doesn’t just become the domain of those who are most bold or vocal; all types of thinkers enjoy more balance in addressing agenda items.
Some popular versions of this agenda-setting technique include meeting participants taking the first several minutes of a meeting to sit quietly and read through all the paragraphs before any discussion or decision-making starts. Again, the idea is to helpfully balance out the varying ways some sales staff process decisions, bringing a diversity of talent to whatever the meeting agenda calls for.
- Turn the meeting agenda into the meeting minutes.
If a sales team follows tip #2 and #3, there’s significant documentation already in existence. These documents can become a start to the agreed-upon, published meeting minutes (or notes). Using the agenda, as the meeting unfolds and direction is set or items are tabled or whatever happens — write it down as a record.
Be careful not to minimize the task of recording meeting minutes; it’s arguably one of the most important outcomes of any meeting, as it gets the idea of “what happened” in a meeting out of people’s heads and onto paper, so to speak.
Many meeting applications and other tools can automatically record a meeting, and some AI tools can even create summary notes. But be careful of over-relying on a meeting recording or these automated assistants. The meeting minutes don’t need to be a verbatim recollection of the entire meeting, and some AI meeting tools can overly genericize content. Instead, ask a meeting participant to record these key pieces of information: decisions reached, items that need follow-up, and open issues. Decisions reached data should include not only the decision or direction but also the people responsible and milestone dates. Items that need follow-up include known topics that were unable to be finished in the meeting but need further time and attention. Open issues are new topics that may have arisen out of the discussion.
- Add the non-sales staff to the sales staff meeting every now and then.
There’s a place for just the sales staff to meet and share and discuss and decide. But it’s likely other staff in your retail outfit have insights for the sales staff or questions they’d like to ask the sales staff. So, provide opportunities for the non-sales staff to interact with the sales staff. Don’t pit these two groups against each other; their thoughtful engagement of one another (hearing from and learning from each other) ultimately can benefit the whole company.
If there’s known contentiousness between your sales staff and other staff, you can start creating harmony by allowing the different staffs to visit each other’s meetings — at first, if necessary, by requiring one group to simply sit in and listen to the other. Then, at the right time, make it a meeting where all are invited to participate —using the tips mentioned above to help lay out expectations in advance, offer opportunity for thoughtful approaches for non-sales people (who may tend to be more introverted), and generally build toward known, cohesive goals. This may foster helpful feedback and idea sharing, from both sides.
