Have you ever analyzed the cost of running your group sales meeting? A sales meeting isn’t merely an hour on the calendar; it’s an investment of expensive selling time.
There is the obvious cost: the payroll sitting in the room or staring back at you on video.
Then there is the opportunity cost.
While your sales team is attending your meeting, they aren’t prospecting, growing existing accounts or preparing for an important customer conversation.
So here’s the million dollar question:
Does your group sales meeting help your sales team hit quota?
If the answer is no, don’t hold the meeting.
Research supports the concern. Organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg and Otter.ai found that companies invest an average of approximately $80,000 per professional employee each year in meetings. About $25,000 of that investment was attributed to meetings employees considered unnecessary. OUCH!
Microsoft found something equally concerning: employees ranked inefficient meetings as their #1 productivity disruptor. The fix:
Practice What You Preach
Here’s the irony.
Sales managers preach the importance of pre-call planning.
We tell salespeople that every prospect and customer meeting should have a defined purpose and objective. Both parties should understand why they are meeting and what they hope to accomplish.
But when we schedule our weekly or monthly group sales meeting, well, we wing it.
There isn’t a defined purpose or objective.
Why are you meeting? Is it to improve a specific selling skill? Build resiliency? Improve prospecting? Solve a problem the entire team is experiencing? Provide motivation and inspiration?
Without a defined purpose and objective, your group sales meeting starts looking like a bad rerun of Groundhog Day. Dread sets in because your team shows up knowing they’re going to experience essentially the same agenda, same updates and same talking points.
Not motivating. And certainly not a revenue generator.
Busy Isn’t an Excuse
Consider Jeff Bezos.
Amazon famously replaced PowerPoint presentations in important internal meetings with carefully prepared narrative memos of up to six pages. Why invest that much preparation time?
Because better preparation produces better thinking and better discussion.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has reinforced the philosophy, noting that narratives are harder for the presenter to prepare—but easier for the audience to understand, engage with and ask the right questions.
If leaders running organizations of that size can make time to prepare for meetings, sales managers can too.
Eat Your Own Dog Food
Sales managers, you already know how to do this.
Plan your group sales meeting the same way you expect your salespeople to plan an important customer meeting.
Have a defined purpose and objective.
Ask yourself: What should my salespeople know, think or do differently as a result of this meeting?
Engage in pre-call planning. Identify articles, podcasts, videos, case studies or customer examples that reinforce the learning point.
Build interaction into the meeting. Practice. Role-play. Debate. Problem-solve.
And perhaps most importantly, stop holding a meeting simply because it’s Tuesday at 9:00.
Before your next meeting, calculate the payroll sitting in the room. Then ask yourself: Would I willingly write a personal check for this amount to conduct this meeting?
Do the work so your sales team can do better work.
Good selling and leading!