I often challenge sales managers to make attendance at their weekly sales team meeting or conference call voluntary. Scary thought for most - salespeople can come up with more excuses for missing a horrible sales team meeting that most can come up with to avoid jury duty. The great thing is that sales managers can hold meetings that team members want to attend. Like anything else it takes repetition and practice.
Here are a few tactics to use to hold meetings your team members will want to attend.
- Begin with relevant, interesting topics and an agenda sent in advance.
- Ask team members to own meeting success. Get their ideas for valuable meetings and give them responsibilities to make the meetings valuable.
- Ask team members to lead topics each meeting.
- Create a little healthy conflict. (Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business by Patrick M. Lencioni)
- Resist the urge to have all the answers. When a sales question comes up, ask another members of the team to give their opinions first.
- Ask one person each week to (1) find an article of interest, (2) send it to their team mates to read before the meeting and then (3) lead a discussion during the meeting.
- Discuss customers at every meeting.
- Have a team member be the keeper of the clock. Their responsibility is to keep the group on track.
- Have a rule that you can discuss any problem if the objective is to find a solution.
- Invite guest speakers once a month or quarter. Let the team be responsible for picking and inviting the guest speaker each time.
I hope these ideas are helpful. They are the results of years of trial and error over the course of 1,000s of sales team meetings. Enjoy the fruits of our pain and suffering. =-)
The Meeting to Win Team
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