Sales meetings are the best time to review the previous month and plan ahead. However, they can also be one of the most unproductive parts of the week if they’re not well-planned.
What is Going Wrong?
- Many sales meetings devolve into venting or boasting sessions that leave little time for early warning signals and deal optimization strategies, instead focusing on what really matters—the success of your sales organization as a whole.
- Stale CRM data makes meetings less valuable because you are using old information which has to be manually updated by your staff, taking away time from their important tasks.
- A common way sales teams lose interest in the meeting when they realize they are not learning anything new.
How to Avoid Venting or Boasting Sessions
Do not go around the room having each seller comment on what they did that week. Meeting minutes become a nightmare when you have 20 reps in a room…the sheer number of comments makes it difficult for everyone in your company to parse through them all. Repetitive, unnecessary feedback causes managers to lose their focus on the actionable insights. Bad sales meetings lead sellers to rely on what they know instead of learning new strategies or getting guidance from other sellers. Ultimately, bad sales meetings lead reps into sales heroics because this is the only way they know how to succeed without any real data points. Instead deploy a platform that can automatically surface buyer and seller activities as well as buyer engagement so your team can focus on the future, not the past.
Real-Time Data is Essential for Success
The manager is relying on manual updates from the meetings into the CRM. With so many product lines, sales reps need frequent updates from each meeting into their CRM or it will be difficult for them to manage leads, track progress and stay organized. Managers complain that it takes way too much time for a busy salesperson to fill out each section of their CRM with information on every single customer who attended the last meeting. Employees feel like they are wasting precious time trying to enter all this data into the system.
Mentor Sellers Through Case Studies and Walkthroughs
Show your team examples of successful deals constantly to keep the team encouraged and make sure you are working as a collective as well as learning something new every meeting. Customer journeys or deal journeys to showcase the right sales process, keep the environment positive. For this you will need some way to capture buyer and seller interactions and timeline activity
3 Solutions
- Instead of losing precious time in unproductive meetings, ensure that you have a platform that can automatically collect buyer and seller activity data that your entire team has access to.
- Free your team from updating CRM so that they can focus on moving deals forward rather than capturing the past.
- Use examples of successful deals done by your team to inform the other sellers to replicate the best practices.
