Team
How to Run a Sales Meeting
Here is a format we use for Sales Meetings – a weekly (or monthly) review of activities from the Sales Team.
Update on activity:
- Number of visits
- Number of asks
Update on productivity:
- Number of commits / declines
- $$ Committed
These metrics provide an objective dashboard that speaks volumes.
- “What gets measured gets done.” – Tom Suddes It’s very easy to get sidetracked. Make it very clear, for yourself and for your sales team, that the first measurement will be number of times we got out of the office to go visit with people. Even without the perfect materials, we know this will have a tremendous positive impact on your organization.
- The dashboard creates accountability. Following on the first point, if you’re a manager you can set goals with your team around number of visits/asks. This ties back to accountability and performance.
- The dashboard points to what’s working and what’s not. We were recently working with an organization that was making 15 visits per week. It was logging only a few ‘commitments’ and no ‘declines.’ We were able to zero in on this and it turned out the staff wasn’t really asking – if you’re asking, you’re going to have some declines! Instead, they were walking through the numbers and ‘hoping’ the prospect would select to give. We did another training session around ‘the last three feet’ of the visit and the numbers then improved.This is a pretty important point. You can deal with real issues as they arise – instead of planning and planning for months/years with no activity.
After the numbers we then review:
- Status of Top Ten Prospects on the Master Prospect List
- Specific ‘Pending Strategies’ that need attention
- Prospect Strategies for the upcoming week
Here is a reporting tool to manage Sales Team Performance – the Green Sheet. Every Sales Team needs a dashboard – for clarity, speed in communication and accountability. In fact, with great teams, the dashboard is more important as a fast communication tool than an accountability process.
