How to run effective sales meetings
In theory, the weekly sales meeting serves a purpose. However, the jury is still out on its effectiveness. One study found that 71% of managers deem meetings unproductive and inefficient. And with only 36% of U.S. employees feeling engaged at work, there are many ways these critical meetings can be improved.
Working as a trusted partner with top CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and CHROs has shown us how to make the weekly sales meeting more effective and elevate what it can achieve. Read on for Numentum’s best practices, followed by seven ways sales meetings should be conducted to ensure return on investment.
Best practices for effective sales meetings
These strategies for the weekly sales meeting ensure sales organizations operate efficiently:
1. Collaborate on the agenda
While a weekly meeting agenda will have recurring items, it should be dynamic. Sales leaders should ask their teams to contribute in advance with obstacles or challenges they would like to discuss. Collaborative software like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 simplifies adding everything into one document.
With a collaborative agenda, sales leaders will be able to run more productive team meetings, having prepared effectively, all while getting a pulse from the team on topics that are priorities for them.
2. Stick to the agenda
Meetings with multiple participants can derail quickly. There’s no easier way to lose the group’s concentration than if a sales leader goes on a tangent only relevant to one or two people. If something can be better handled in a one-on-one environment, sales leaders should recognize this quickly and take it offline.
Another reason to stick to the agenda is to ensure meetings end on time. Writing in Forbes, Salesforce’s Mark Hunter describes a great sales meeting as “a reflection of how a good sales call should go.” Sales leaders must respect their team’s time while encouraging discussion and reaching an agreement on specific next steps.
3. Be clear on next steps
Many of us are in too many meetings. We jump from one to the next with barely a moment for a bathroom break or to refill a water bottle.
Sales leaders must diligently articulate the next steps for each agenda item as the meeting progresses. They should re-share the document afterward and ask for updates to be reported there rather than at the beginning of the next meeting. This keeps the team marching forward rather than continually circling back to discuss ongoing (but less relevant) updates.
Being conscious of the process pre-, during, and post-meeting will help the sales organization stay focused on the task at hand—to support each other to sell and drive value for the business.
Seven ways to elevate your sales meetings
With our track record of improving sales productivity and team performance, these are Numentum’s seven top recommendations to get more out of your weekly team meeting:
1. Change when it happens
Have your sales leaders asked when the meeting works best for their team members?
We teach the importance of compassionate leadership. Sales leaders must know their people as human beings, and these humans may have competing priorities. That Monday morning meeting might be a nightmare for the parent who has to get their kids to school or for people who need the quiet time to set themselves up for a productive week.
Scheduling the recurring meeting at a time that works best for everyone will reward sales leaders with better preparation, higher engagement, and increased employee satisfaction.
2. Record key updates beforehand
The weekly sales meeting is a unique time that brings the team together. Rather than just throw information at them, sales leaders should use the forum to ideate on business challenges and share learnings.
This requires more prep work. At Numentum, we recommend recording a video message in advance that covers the critical updates—business announcements, performance against targets, and any other numbers that the team needs to know.
By getting everyone on the same page beforehand, the sales team can use the time during the meeting to work collaboratively and leverage their collective knowledge to problem solve.
3. Ideate on deal challenges
In a high-pressure role like sales, it’s not uncommon for sellers struggling with a deal to keep to themselves for fear of appearing they lack control or capability. Leaders can help break this habit by creating a psychologically safe environment for their sellers to open up in.
By way of next step, sales teams well-versed in Numentum's Warm Introduction Process™ will look in real-time at their own LinkedIn networks to determine who can facilitate an introduction. This negates the need for their colleague to keep trying cold outreach. Selling is a team sport, and this increases the chances of success exponentially.
We advise sales leaders to leverage the weekly sales meeting to facilitate discussion on possible strategies using their collective experience. This encourages group critical thinking and prevents your team from reinventing the wheel for every obstacle they encounter.
4. Share professional wins
Research by Hubspot revealed that salespeople rely on their peers for improvement tips, over and above their managers and training resources.
Sales leaders must foster this learning culture by allowing individuals to discuss recent professional wins. These don’t have to be deal-won stories. Instead, someone might share how they have successfully adopted a process efficiency they were taught in a training course.
The goal is for the rest of the team to learn something new and flex that muscle of support and recognition for each other’s achievements. This cultivates an environment of optimism that will help sellers bring their best selves to work.
5. Build cross-functional understanding
Creating a culture of empathy across the sales organization is a worthy, if demanding, endeavor. The sales meeting is an excellent opportunity to nurture this skill by helping the team understand the business's more operational components.
Leaders should invite cross-functional representatives from across the Revenue Engine to discuss their team’s focus, priorities, and impact on sales. This allows sellers to create relationships across the business—but also understand the limits of what other teams can do and why not all demands from sales can be met.
6. Boost team morale
Numentum encourages sales leaders to invite an executive to a weekly sales meeting as a great strategy to improve team morale and make a sales team feel important.
Sales leaders will gain the most from executive involvement by embracing the pre-work of bringing them up to speed on the team’s priorities and recent achievements. With this information, the executive will be able to build trust by speaking knowledgeably about its importance to the business, acknowledge challenges (sellers need to feel heard), and commend any outstanding performances.
7. Get customer feedback
Finally, we recommend inviting another third party to the sales meeting: a new customer.
New customers are a goldmine of valuable information for the sales team. Having emerged (victorious) from your sales process, they will have insight into what worked and didn’t. Companies must encourage their leaders to create this open feedback loop to enable sellers to learn from the successes of their peers.
Understanding the bigger picture
Standing meetings both benefit and suffer from the same thing: predictability. Knowing there’s always a set meeting on a fixed day of the calendar can provide convenience and a sense of certainty. But, as such, that means they also can fall prey to monotony and disengagement: “I have to be here because the meeting’s on the calendar” instead of getting together to actively work through a plan.
Leaders must discipline themselves to ensure their weekly sales meetings are needle-moving and proactive enough to keep participants productive and engaged. That can be hard to achieve when the going gets tough, and the pressure is on. Like going to the gym, a leader will inevitably flub a week or so. The important part is that they quickly return to form, ensuring that people are showing up because they want to collaborate and improve, not just because the calendar told them so.
Revenue Forward
Numentum is a buyer experience consultancy that helps B2B organizations go to market faster, bigger, and more effectively without the need for an expensive and time-consuming overhaul of existing processes and systems. We partner with CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and CHROs to develop customized training programs that integrate brand, sales, and marketing to deliver accelerated revenue momentum.
By efficiently focusing on the buyer experience, we advance the skills, information, and interactions sales professionals must deploy to engage with today’s hyper-informed buyers effectively. Our approach aligns sales with marketing to maximize the utility of brand investments, content, and digital channels—dramatically improving pipelines, shortening buying cycles, and increasing conversion rates.
Learn more about our approach with this introduction to the Connected and Empowered Enterprise, and follow us on LinkedIn for more strategies and tactics that drive revenue forward.
