How to Run an Effective Sales Team Meeting in 7 Steps

The sales manager leads a sales team meeting and brings together the people responsible for delivering your business sales objectives to review progress and priorities.

Getting these meetings format, frequency, and content right can make the difference between achieving your sales revenue target or failing to deliver and putting your business at risk. We’ve outlined the seven steps to running an effective sales meeting.

1 – Have a Clear Purpose & Agenda

There’s little that is more annoying to sales team members than when sales managers have a standing sales meeting without a clear purpose or when it feels like meeting “just to meet.” Make sure your meeting has a clear purpose. For example, some meetings are designed to review performance and progress toward set goals, while others may involve goal planning and some might be reserved for specific training.

No matter what the purpose of the meeting is, share the agenda beforehand via email. If you expect your sales reps to come prepared with specific information, such as a status report on open deals, make sure to ask them a few days beforehand.

A few common types of sales team meetings include:

•     Deal opportunity forecasting meetings
•     Training and coaching meetings
•     Operational sales meetings
•     Performance assessment meetings

2 . Create Clear Sales Meeting Expectations

Sales meetings should be mandatory to ensure everyone is up-to-date on team priorities and goals, ensuring everyone knows they are expected to be there unless they are on paid time-off or sick leave. If they are, sales managers can record meetings for absent team members to watch later or give them an update afterward.

Team members should also be expected to participate in sales team meetings rather than merely be present. For example, each person should provide an update on the status of their deals. Another great expectation is that no one brings a phone or computer to the meeting, or at least that cell phones are put away for the meeting duration.

A computer may be necessary for reviewing reports or taking notes, but that should be the exception. Team members should also be transparent when talking about sales deals and focus on collaboration over competition. Finally, meetings should start on time and end on time to show respect for everyone’s valuable work time during the day.

3. Keep the Conversation on Track

The sales manager’s job is to keep things on track during the meeting and follow the agenda. However, it’s not uncommon for an agenda item to take up too much time and get the meeting off track. Or, an unrelated issue may come up that throws the agenda off schedule.

If this happens, set up a time to discuss it later rather than dismiss the issue or let the meeting run long. One great way to stay on track is to allow a certain number of minutes to each agenda item and wrap up and move to the next topic once the time is up.

4 . Review Progress Toward Goals

In a general sales meeting, one of the most important things your team will tackle is reviewing the progress toward your monthly sales goals. It’s an excellent idea to have each sales rep come to the table with their current won deals, projected won deals, and lost deals. Once you have a good idea of your sales forecast, you can make adjustments.

For example, if it looks like you aren’t close to hitting your monthly revenue goal, you can add more leads to the pipeline to create more sales opportunities. Conversely, if the team is doing better than expected as a whole, you can change your monthly sales goal to a higher number and encourage the team to stretch to meet it.

5. Discuss Challenges & Solutions

Sales meetings offer a good opportunity to collaborate rather than just give status reports. This gives sales reps a chance to talk about deals that are stuck in the pipeline that they can’t seem to move forward or talk about objections from prospective customers.

For example, one sales rep might mention that a promising sales deal seems to have gone cold because it has been over two weeks since they have been able to get in touch with them. Sales managers and other sales reps can give them tips on engaging the prospect with follow-up email templates or talking about the best time to reach people on the phone.

6. Acknowledge Successes & Recognize High Performers

While the sales team is together during a meeting, it’s the perfect time to discuss successes and recognize high performers. For example, sales managers should give public recognition to sales reps who closed the most deals or generated the most revenue the previous month.

You can also recognize up-and-coming reps, such as a “most improved” recognition. Consider giving small awards—they don’t have to be expensive. For example, you can print out certificates of achievement, frame them, and present them during the meeting or give out gift cards to a local coffee shop. This also helps keep your sales team motivated.

7. Discuss Next Steps & Key Action Items

Before each sales meeting, designate a person to take meeting notes so you can keep track of what you discussed and record action items. Write down key goals and revenue goals for the next month (or by your next meeting).

You should also outline any new product changes or tools the team will be using and highlight any extra responsibilities for certain team members, such as mentoring new hires. Finally, send out the meeting notes to every team member after each meeting so everyone knows what is expected of them and what they should be working to accomplish before the next sales meeting.

Sales Meeting Tools

There are several sales management tools that can be used to help you have a productive sales meeting. A few of the tools many small businesses use include:

•     Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps sales teams analyze where every deal is in the pipeline. A CRM such as Pipedrive is affordable and helps teams track deals, collaborate, and create accurate sales forecasts.
•     Meeting scheduling tools: This helps remove the back and forth of emailing to schedule sales meetings. For example, Sprintful connects to your calendars, allowing sales managers to find the best time for the entire sales team to meet.
•     Video conferencing tools: Video conferencing tools make it easy to meet “face-to-face” without being in the same room for remote teams. For example, Zoom is an excellent, easy-to-use program that allows video calls, chat, and screen sharing.
•     Sales meeting agenda template: We’ve created a sales meeting template you can customize to develop your agendas.

operations team members. 

Bottom Line

Sales meetings are a critical part of fostering a healthy, transparent sales environment. However, be careful not to have meetings “just to meet.” Instead, each sales meeting should have a clear purpose and agenda, encourage robust participation, build rapport, and end with action items and next steps.