It’s hard to find a salesperson who’s enthusiastic about attending meetings. It’s understandable – most people in sales are about action and delivering results. Introspection does not always come easy when there’s leads to be tracked down.
However, meetings are a necessary evil. Without them, it’s hard to find out what works and what doesn’t. And they don’t have to be dull either. There certainly are topics even veteran salespersons would find interesting. Try using these topics as an agenda of your next sales team meeting for a fruitful and interesting discussion.
1.) Handling rejection
Sales reps who don’t understand how to take “no” for an answer will tend to be demotivated or pushy in a way that turns off potential customers. Role-play common customer objections and rejections and see if you can develop a set of natural-sounding, effective responses.
2.) Qualifying Leads
Bad leads can suck the life out of your sales team and the inability to identify them quickly can spell trouble for your campaign. A set process of quickly determining whether or not a lead is qualified can be important for helping your sales team work more efficiently. At your meeting, you can toss around questions that would be good for quickly sorting out your prospects.
3.) Prospecting/lead generation
Your sales team can toss around ideas on how to quickly generate qualified leads over the phone and social media. Networking skills can also be honed and shared during these sessions.
4.) Marketing & sales integration
A sales and marketing team that works well together is an incredible asset for any company. Unfortunately, not many actually have a sales and marketing team that work all that well together. Identifying pain points with counterparts in marketing can help create a better alignment within an organization, as well as a clearer understanding of boundaries.
5.) Building credibility
Discuss what seemed to work well for each sales rep when it came to building their credibility with different sets of customers. Reps may even test out the different trust-building statements and questions on calls and report their experiences in subsequent meetings.
6.) Creating emotional desires
A lot of sales teams focus on creating logical arguments for getting a customer to buy. While necessary, the emotional argument also has to be covered. Have reps discuss how they’re able to get customers emotionally involved in a decision.
7.) Discuss what customers value
Discussions related to products and price can get pretty dry. And it’s all moot if your sales team does not truly understand what customers desire. Have reps discuss pain points that customers have revealed to them and how they might be addressed. This data can also be valuable for marketing and product development teams as well.
8.) Sales team branding
Some sales teams have a specific brand – the Avon ladies are one prominent example. Would the business be helped by having the sales reps dress a certain way? Why and why not?
9.) What keeps your team motivated?
One under-discussed sales topic (at least with management) is the link between motivation and performance. Understanding the underlying anxieties that are plaguing an underperforming team won’t always come easy, but it has to be done.
10.) Closing lines
What lines does each sales team member use to seal the deal? Others may have a set script while others might prefer to wing it. Discuss the different advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
Bonus.) Simplifying sales proposals
If your sales team finds itself constantly creating new sales proposals, share tips on how to make things a little easier. Discuss the process flows you each use to create your sales proposals. You can also recommend apps such as Proposable to make the process straightforward and the proposals more appealing to customers.
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