Why Your Sales Meetings Suck (and how to fix them)

Your sales reps hate going to your sales meetings. The team meetings, the ones where the rep who hasn’t properly updated their pipeline gets humiliated (again) in front of his or her peers. Those are the ones I’m talking about. I know reps hate them because over the course of my career I’ve sat through a bunch of them, and I’ve probably been the owner of a few of them along the way too (thankfully I learned and adapted early on).

They don’t have to suck. They can be good, they can be fast, and they can be helpful… for everyone. Two common problems I’ve seen way too many times are easy to spot and easy to remedy.

1. If you are doing pipeline reviews in a team setting stop doing it. Immediately. Those should be done in an individual setting every few weeks (roughly) and should be detailed and designed to add value to each and every deal for that rep. While it’s likely that other reps could learn by listening to you coach on someone else’s deals, the pain of sitting through an hour of this far outweighs the benefits, and most of them aren’t listening anyway.
2. Don’t try to jam other things into the meeting, such as training. If there is a need to train on something, set up a training specifically for that topic. If you are jamming other things or topics into the sales meeting then you probably have allocated too much time for this and need to hit the reset button.

So here’s a recipe for a reboot of your sales meetings:

• Keep them very short and do them stand-up style (once per week or twice per week, in the mornings before the selling hours start).
• Focus on currently committed deals only, not the entire pipeline, and once a deal is committed, an update (brief) is provided until it comes in or is lost (but it’s a commit, so that’s not possible, right?)
• Talk through wins and losses. Wins: Why did the customer buy and what is their expected value from the solution (how are you going to help their business). Losses: What could have been done better / more / differently to change the outcome
• You’re meeting with the team, so focus on the team’s results vs individuals against plan, but…
• Celebrate successes like team members going over quota, or achieving an objective, etc

Take care to realize what should be put in the individual pipeline review meetings and what should go into full team meetings, as it may be time to hit the reset button.