Sales leaders like you are always looking for new ways to engage, inspire and strengthen selling skills.
Before we make suggestions on meeting topics you can execute, let’s review the need for your sales meetings to be relevant and beneficial to your team. Here are some statistics to consider:
- 80% of meeting time could be eliminated with rules and a tight agenda
- Fewer than 37% of sales managers publish agendas
- 92% of people multitask in meetings
- 71% of sales meetings are deemed unproductive or inefficient
Whether you are meeting in person or virtually, here are five sales meeting topics that are easy to execute and extremely beneficial at closing common sales skill gaps:
1. The Competitive Intelligence Review Meeting
Sadly, too few salespeople research their top competitors. They may have visited their website, but fail to keep up to date with current messaging, promotions or packaging methods that may be used against your team. To execute this popular sales meeting, simply assign one of your top competitors to each sales rep on your team. Ask them to research their competitor and present the findings for 5, 10 or 15 minutes at the next sales meeting. Reps should be encouraged to look at their competitor’s website, social media and reviews from a customer’s perspective. Keeping a time limit will help reps stay on track, and you can expand or review later if needed.
2. The LinkedIn Profile & Activity Review Meeting
You and your reps know your customers and prospects are on LinkedIn. That’s why you and your reps need to be active there too. You can warn your reps in advance or just surprise them with a review of each of their LinkedIn profiles to see if their profile is branded, showcases the company’s value proposition, how many connections the person has and how many posts they’ve made in the last 30 days. Warning – this meeting can make people uncomfortable, but it will keep them engaged, and it’s tough to argue with what they know is the right thing to do.
3. The Sales Prospecting Meeting
This meeting is perfect for sales teams that require reps to be proficient prospecting over the phone and email. As the sales leader, start by creating a fictitious account that represents a common new business account your people would love to meet with. You define the industry, the size, the potential need, etc.
Using that information, ask each rep to send you (the sales leader) a prospecting email and voicemail. At the following meeting, provide copies of all the emails and review them. Do the same with your prospecting voicemails by playing them out loud.
This will allow you to see and hear what they are sending prospects – and expose newer reps to what the more experienced ones are doing for training purposes.
4. The Sales Demo Contest Meeting
Pick a popular product and tell your reps in advance that you will be asking them to demo the product at the upcoming meeting. In the meeting, ask each rep to do a demonstration as if you were the customer. Watch their approaches closely. Did they talk too much? Did they start by asking some questions? The best practice sharing and learning lessons here can be tremendous and it’s very easy to execute. Again, set a time limit for the sales demonstrations to keep things moving along and give everyone a chance to participate.
5. The Objection Handling Meeting
Objections are part of any sales role. Great sales reps are prepared with responses to common resistance they hear daily. To strengthen your team’s objection handling skills, simply get a deck of cards and write a common objection on several cards. In the meeting ask each rep to pick a card. Read the objection on the card they selected and see what they say. You may be shocked or impressed. Only you will know when you try this popular skill builder in your next team sales meeting.
Preparing your people to be successful starts in your sales meetings.
Done well, your salespeople will be engaged and more confident about their ability to sell more and make more. Together, everyone gets stronger and these five meeting ideas will help you expose weaknesses, learn new things and strengthen your team’s selling skills along the way!
