Effective Sales Meetings

There are two basic types of sales meetings, information and training; do not try to mix the two. Here are some rules to follow for having effective sales meetings:

1. It is vitally important that sales managers come to each meeting thoroughly prepared. You should bring and pass out copies of your agenda to the meetings.
2. Plan meetings and stay on plan.
3. If you don’t finish a topic in the allotted time (never more than an hour), carry it over to the next scheduled meeting.
4. Do not call unscheduled meetings except in dire emergencies.
5. Salespeople must be able to plan their days and weeks in advance and stick to their plans. Therefore, your meetings should be scheduled at the same times every week.
6. The number of meetings you have should be based on your salespeople’s training needs. With sales staffs that need a lot of training on product, client knowledge, research, and sales techniques, you might need a many as two or three brief (twenty minutes) early morning meetings a week. With an experienced staff, one information meeting a week and one training meeting every other week might suffice.

For most media sales departments, sales managers should have the following meetings:

1. Monday or Tuesday morning sales meeting (Information). Have a general sales meeting Monday or Tuesday morning in which you go over information that is relevant to everyone: pricing, inventory, competitive activity, kudos, and programming (or editorial, content), and promotion information. Keep this meeting brief (half-hour maximum) and cover only material that is relevant to everyone. Start the meeting at exactly 8:30 a.m. and lock the door. Don't wait to start the meeting until everyone arrives, by doing this, you reward people for being late. You must always start meetings precisely on time. Salespeople want to get out on the street by 9:00 a.m. Let them! Plan the agenda for the meeting in advance and stick to it. Remember, you are keeping a good sales staff off the street, so you’d better have something really important to tell them in every meeting—make them relevant, short, and informative. The main rule for a meeting is never to talk about something unless it has relevance to everyone at the meeting. Don’t ask for individual reports of any kind; do individual reports them separately.
2. Monday individual meetings. You should meet individually with each salesperson for a few minutes to go over his or her weekly planner. The planner should include the calls the salespeople plan to make during the week and the tactics they are going to use on each call. You should emphasize tactical discussions with the salespeople: How they are going to approach a customer’s advertising problem, what they are going to offer, what their overall target is, what their rates are, what their presentation and packages are like, what their closing tactics will be, and so forth. The emphasis should be on planning and the future, and on tactics—rates, production, promotions, ideas, for example. Some salespeople will require more time, new ones perhaps as much as half an hour. Others who are well organized and right on target, will require as little as five or ten minutes. Have them leave a copy of their weekly planner with you (don't be too demanding of the experienced, successful salespeople on this request; if they are doing well, you want to use this individual meeting mostly for stroking and encouragement). By discussing the tactics on each account up front, you will be able to give your salespeople more autonomy and freedom to negotiate. Remember, your objectives are: To communicate to salespeople that you trust them and to keep their tires on the road. Plan your individual meetings better in order to keep them short and to the point. Plan account tactics in advance, so salespeople have more autonomy and don't have to come and check rates and other details with you. They are motivated by autonomy.

The next week in the individual meetings, briefly go over the results of the previous week’s calls—orders, dollar amounts, and so forth. Then discuss the new week’s planner. In this manner you keep track of what salespeople are doing. Do not make negative comments or assessments when you first begin using this system, because you want to train people to use you as a coach and tactical resource, not to see you as a cop who doesn’t trust them and is checking up on them.

3. Training meetings. Start with positioning. Make sure salespeople understand how to position their product. Stress new business and key account development. Emphasize current research material. Have each salesperson rotate in presenting reports on competitors in training meetings. Don’t stress monitor reports, since often the only way to get business that is already running somewhere else is to reduce rates. In fact, every six months have each salesperson give a presentation on a major competitor and on competitive media as though they were selling for them. Become media experts. Also, become client experts. Have guests come to your training meetings: Agencies, clients, and research experts, for example.

In these training meetings, do role playing on how to overcome objections. Use other role playing techniques, too. Give salespeople relevant selling problems to solve, pricing decisions to make, promotion ideas, list distribution exercises, and sales promotion material evaluation, for example. You should have hired bright, motivated salespeople, so get their input on what training they need and on what sales promotion material they need. They are the best judges of what training and knowledge will help them sell more effectively. Regularly conduct brainstorming sessions.

Also, brainstorm with clients. An excellent way to create added value for clients is to have them come to your offices (and bring their agencies if they want to) and brainstorm with your salespeople about ideas that will improve their business: copy ideas, promotions, positioning statements and slogans, for example.

When you cover material in training meetings, it is good practice to follow up with quizzes. Salespeople pay much more attention if they know they will be quizzed in some way on the material covered. Make the quizzes fun and give small rewards for high scores, such as $50.

4. Monthly objective-setting meetings. Meet with salespeople monthly to help them set their objectives for the coming month. Remember that objectives should be activity oriented: How many calls will they average a day, how many presentations will they give, what accounts will they call on, what are their unit rates going to be, what is their closing ratio going to be? Write down their objectives and keep a copy so that the next month you can go over with them how they did in accomplishing their objectives. Use these meetings as coaching sessions (see the Coaching section below).
5. Quarterly review meetings. Read carefully the Performance Coaching and Discipline Without Punishment section below. By having these formal quarterly coaching sessions, you will be able to give proper recognition to the superstars and help those who aren’t meeting your standards to set appropriate improvement goals.

Guidelines for Running Effective Meetings

Key roles and responsibilities. The first thing to do before you conduct a formal meeting is to define the four key roles and responsibilities in the meeting:

1. Leader
2. Note Taker
3. Timekeeper
4. Facilitator (if applicable)

The leader cannot be the note taker because there is too much a meeting’s leader has to do; however, the leader can be the timekeeper, although that function, too is best given to someone else. The note taker can also serve as a timekeeper. Taking notes is important in order to have a record of the meeting so that assigned tasks and projects can be followed up on.

Plan and Communicate. There are six elements of a meeting that must be defined and communicated to those attending beforehand so that they have time to prepare and know what to expect.

1. Define the purpose of the meeting:

A. To give or get information

B. To make a decision

C. To solve problems

D. To brainstorm

E. To assign tasks

F. To train

2. Identify meeting topics, the people responsible for introducing or explaining the topics, and set objectives for the meeting.

A. Prepare meeting presentations if needed

B. Determine participants

C. Arrange for logistics

D. Communicate with participants

Open the Meeting. It is imperative to start all meetings on time—wait for no one. Review the purpose of meeting and briefly go over the agenda. Then, introduce participants, if not everyone at the meeting knows everyone. Set people’s expectations for outcomes of the meeting, and, finally, assign roles.

Conduct the Meeting. Observe the following rules for conducting a meeting:

1. The leader must structure the discussion and follow the agenda items.

2. The leader must stay on track and not allow the discussion to wander into areas not on the agenda. If an issue comes up that is urgent, put it aside and deal with it at the end of the meeting or set another meeting to deal with it if it is important enough. But do not let anyone hijack your meeting; if you allow it once, people will continue to hijack your meeting and take you hostage to their agendas.

3. Stay engaged and focused on the discussion.

4. Promote positive interactions among people. Do not allow people to get personal or sarcastic or to snipe at others. Meetings must be polite and positive.

5. Summarize each topic after people are finished discussing it. Summarizing clarifies the discussion and leads to cloture.

Close the Meeting. Summarize meeting outcomes and specify next steps. Action items or next steps are an important part of any meeting. If a meeting ends with no next steps or action items, then the meeting was a failure—nothing got accomplished. Ask everyone in the meeting to assess the effectiveness of the meeting. Did it meet their expectations, did it accomplish something, and was the outcome worthwhile? Finally, always (and that means always) end your meetings on time.

Follow Up. Send a quick “thank you” e-mail to everyone who attended the meeting and thank them for their contribution. Have the note taker write up and distribute a meeting summary. Complete any action items that were assigned to you and periodically check with others to see what their progress is on completing their action items.