How to have better sales meetings

Sales meetings are usually bad and frequently a waste of time for a number of reasons.  In a virtual world, where you don't even see your sales people while you are meeting with them, things get even worse.  I used to have a manager who made me drive 3 hours both ways once a month so that I could attend his Monthly Sales Meetings that most people slept through or made excuses avoid.

1) Sales managers and their managers have to learn to trust the system.  If you use a system like Salesforce.com, make sure every sales person religiously updates it and then use it to generate reports and dashboards for management and yourself.  This way you can be very up to date on everything and know that even more data is available if you need it, without having to go through the details of every deal on every weekly call.  It is a huge relief to be able to trust the system and let go of the tedious inspections.   It reminds me of David Allen's book Getting Things Done.  Once you get everything in a system you trust, you can relax and focus on execution and not worry about what you are missing.

2) Sales managers are or used to be sales people and they like to talk.   In order for sales meetings to be succesful, I would argue that sales managers in general need to talk less. Collaboration is much more powerful than any one person so don't be afraid to let everyone else talk and pitch in.  It doesn't mean you aren't doing your job.  What you should do, is be a catalyst for good conversations.

3) Sales managers are also very susceptible to what I will call the Idea of the Month.  Since they spend a lot of time thinking about how to do things better and typically read and research a lot this as well, they sometimes will latch on to the latest idea and create a whole meeting around it. The problem is that most of the good sales people probably read the same books and do the same research.  What I do is write a blog and I used to write a newsletter/email for my team so that I could get book recommendations and ideas out to them in a way they could consume on their own time and not on a weekly call.

4) Agendas are also very important. If you don't tell your team what to expect and what to prepare for, they won't be prepared and won't have thought of questions and will end up not paying attention.  I just read a great interview of Jill Myrick on the MyVenturePad blog by David Stein about how to have better sales meetings.  Jill is a sales consultant whose company Meeting to Win  and blog  are also great places to go for ideas on making your sales meetings worthwhile and motivating.

5) Take the one on one discussions off line.  If you have to talk about a particular deal in real depth or if you have found information lacking in your sales system, then set up another 20-30 minutes with the person to discuss this.  I would recommend 20-30 minutes per week with each rep anyway if you can afford the time to make sure you are hearing things from them that they don't want to mention in the group.

6) Start and finish on time.  If you don't hold the call for people who show up late, they should eventually figure out that they shouldn't show up late.