The purpose of your sales meeting should be to help salespeople sell more products. I like to hold sales meetings at 9 a.m. on Mondays. Attendance is mandatory for all sales-people and anyone else involved in sales management — and the meetings should last no longer than one hour. As a sales manager/owner, what you should get from your salespeople at this meeting is their weekly sales commitment, as well as how much they're going to collect on each job, if that's part of their responsibility.
Coaching Experience Now, what can you give them in that meeting? Help them sell more. Role-play different closing situations. Listen to a sales tape and discuss it. Practice sales presentations. Assign a part of the meeting to a different person each week —preparing will help them improve.
You may have just one weekly sales meeting, but sales coaching is a full-time job. It will require you to be available to your sales staff. Other responsibilities will likely pale in comparison to what helping one of your salespeople close a job can do for you.
Ask staff to give you feedback on your meetings. Salespeople hate sales meetings because they see them as a rerun of the week before. Make them interesting, informative, and beneficial.
—Phil Rea has conducted more than 13,200 in-home sales calls and trained more than 1,750 salespeople. He shares his sales strategies each month with salespeople across the country through the MasterMind Program. For more information call 866.441.7445.
