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Editor's note: This is one of our most popular articles, so we've made some changes to keep it fresh and relevant.
Whether it’s your first time running a sales meeting or your 100th, this time is yours to connect with and support your team.
As a sales leader, meetings with your whole team of reps can be a valuable health check for your business — but they can also waste salespeople’s valuable time selling. Make the time together count by developing the right agenda, sharing critical updates, and fostering group discussion, while leaving simpler updates for email.
Prepare for, refine, and polish your next sales meeting agenda with the advice in this article. You’ll be running efficient meetings for your team in no time.
First off, let’s define a sales meeting. A sales meeting is an internal check-in between sales leaders and practitioners at a company. In contrast to an external-facing meeting, like a sales call or sales pitch, this meeting is for internal attendees only and meant to give sales team members the information they need to do their jobs well. Typically sales leaders (like a sales manager, director, or VP) run the meeting and sales reps will attend. Leaders highlight important updates that could include:
Current sales performance
What’s top of mind for leaders
Competitive insights
What the team’s next priorities should be
Your own meeting agendas will differ based on whether you’re running a weekly sales meeting, a quarterly review, an annual sales kick-off, or something else. But the next 10 tips will help you stay on track, show respect for your team, and be as efficient as possible in your sales meetings, no matter what you’re discussing that day.
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Make sure you and your team know what you’re meeting about in crystal-clear terms. For instance, is it a quick standup to discuss progress on a specific key performance indicator (KPI), or a critical end-of-quarter meeting to see who needs help closing deals?
Don’t call your salespeople together without a clear agenda and a few simple objectives. Pulling salespeople into a meeting takes them away from combing through leads, putting together emails and pitch decks, and, ultimately, growing revenue.
Once you’ve developed your agenda and goals, decide who the best person will be to speak to each topic. Work with presenters in advance to answer these questions:
Who will kick off the meeting?
Who will present their screen, if needed?
How will you handle transitions?
Will you save questions for the end or answer them throughout?
Is there a key call to action (CTA) you want every meeting attendee to take?
Send the agenda to attendees ahead of every meeting. It can be a loose outline, but this will show everyone that you’re focused on making solid use of their time.
Whether you’re presenting in today’s increasingly remote workplace or in person, work out any technological kinks in advance. Computer updates should be completed, software should be downloaded, and unnecessary programs or chats should be closed.
You don’t want glitches eating into your time and derailing your meeting, so ask meeting presenters to meet a few minutes early to test the full set-up. That pre-work may only take 10 minutes, but it pays off in dividends. If it’s just you running the meeting, you can do the same thing on your own: Test your equipment and go through the presenting motions just as you would during the real thing.
Respect your team’s time by keeping the meeting on schedule. Sales reps meticulously plan their days so they can squeeze in the maximum number of customer calls and emails, so set the tone so that your meeting cadence reliably sticks to its time slot.
If you notice meetings go over, consider saving questions or comments for designated moments in the meeting or reducing the number of topics each meeting covers. Revisit your sales meeting agenda by asking for attendee feedback to learn which topics are most valuable. You don’t want to cut important conversations short, but you also need to keep an eye on time, and this is a delicate balance.
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Make every instance of your meeting count. We’ve all heard the joke, “I survived another meeting that could have been an email.” Indeed, email can be an effective, concise way to communicate with your team when it comes to quick company updates or plan changes.
The timing and cadence for sales meetings is crucial. If you have a daily standup or other recurring meeting, consider pivoting to a less-frequent timeline if you ever begin to notice you’re covering something non-essential.
Alternatively, don’t feel pressured to meet every time you initially planned to meet. If you cancel a meeting when you didn’t have important updates to share, those bonus minutes can be given back to the team will be applied to meaningful work — and your team will appreciate that you’re not holding meetings just for the sake of it.
As the leader, it’s your job to update the team on anything you’ve learned that might not have been passed down to them yet, especially if it’s been a while since you last met.
Brief everyone on any pricing changes, sales forecasting updates, product news, leadership shifts, or other integral information that could affect how they sell. Follow up on any issues or questions from past meetings, too. This part of the sales meeting may run for different amounts of time, and if the topic has the potential to run too long, consider having a special sales meeting with only that item on the agenda.
When you’re all together in a sales meeting, it’s often helpful to have everyone share what’s working and what’s not. Touch base on leads and accounts, how key conversations are going, and everyone’s overall status report regarding hitting their quotas and KPIs.
On top of progress, listen for any roadblocks. As a manager, if members of your team are hitting roadblocks, you need to be aware so you can help clear the path for success.
Once you know what’s going well and what needs additional focus, you can develop an action plan with individual team members or a larger group.
Did a team member close a big deal? Surpass their quota six months in a row? Set aside time in your sales meeting agenda specifically to give them kudos. Not only do people often appreciate being recognized, it’s good for the entire organization.
Recognition is a good motivator for both the individual being recognized and the team as a whole. A survey from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and Globoforce shares that “68 percent of HR professionals agreed that employee recognition has a positive impact on retention and 56 percent said such programs also help with recruitment.”
Be specific in your praise, too. Saying you appreciate that someone took the time to onboard a client who needs more attention than usual will mean more than a generic “good job.” Of course, not everyone likes being publicly singled out, so make sure you’re giving team members credit in the formats they prefer. You can vet this with each rep in one-on-one meetings.
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Your sales meeting agendas should always include time to exchange thoughts as a group. These meetings aren’t only about what you want to communicate; they’re also a way for team members to learn from each other and build on one another’s best practices.
For example, you may invite brainstorms or idea exchanges on:
Better sales and marketing or sales and service alignment
New positioning of your products or services
Partnering with other peers or vendors in your industry
Your competitors and how they’re selling, marketing, or pricing their products
Shaping goals for the next quarter or year
Focus on topics that will be relevant to most salespeople on the line so they don’t start tuning out during the meeting and multitasking.
As you work through each item on your sales meeting agenda, clarify any action items and who’s responsible for following up on each. No one should leave the meeting feeling ambiguous about next steps.
Team members can be responsible for following up with their own prospects and customers. However, if there are other department-wide needs raised during the meeting, such as talking to the finance team about a new promotion or discussing a new lead generation campaign with marketing, you should designate a point person. This way, important items won’t fall through the cracks. Make it clear which updates you want the team to bring to the next meeting as well.
Sales can be hard. This profession is marked by a lot of rejection and patience, and mistakes will be made from time to time. Sometimes the market slows down and prospects just aren’t biting. No matter the reason why times are tough, the team as a whole — or individual sales reps — will struggle sometimes.
During these times, it’s your opportunity as a leader to address issues head on and communicate authentically with the team. If you share why you’re still inspired and motivated about the team’s work, others will be motivated, too. Carve out time in your agenda to do that when times get tough.
Even in easier times, fun and positive ways to motivate your team abound. You can introduce games and contests to celebrate what’s going well, and award unique prizes for different milestones.
Tough times don’t last, but tough sales teams do.
At the end of the day, you want your salespeople focused on potential customers. Your sales meetings are a way to refocus them on what matters and help everyone stay productive.
Remember that every sales rep’s time is money, and run your sales meetings with efficiency in mind. For more tips on boosting sales productivity, check out our complete guide for sales leaders.
