Sales Leaders Rule #28: A sales meeting is your sales presentation.

Sales managers obviously want sales meetings to be informative and effective; but often we know they're not. While the intention to run effective meetings is always there, many sales leaders find themselves running from one meeting to the next. As the day gets eaten away, the 30-minute window for preparation turns into a three-minute window and the sales manager is forced into the meeting unprepared.

Senior execs are watching you run a meeting to determine competency. Salespeople are looking at you for guidance on sales strategies and how to run a meeting. No one cares about the reasons you aren’t prepared. They just recognize that meetings are often not run well. An unfocused meeting starts to call your qualification and leadership ability into question which can undermine any attempts you make to inspire the team or improve the sales strategy.

Sales meetings can make or break your reputation so schedule time to prepare ahead of time. Assume you're not going to have any time between meetings for you to prepare.
What needs prepared? A game plan. Define the basics of the meeting for yourself. Who should be at meetings? What are we specifically going to cover at the meeting? Do you need to alert other attendees about any preparatory work they should complete beforehand?

Everyone at a meeting should have a defined role and purpose for being in the meeting. If they do not, remove them from it. There’s nothing worse than people attending a meeting that leave wondering why they were included in the first place.

Once you’ve defined the group, different agendas should be set for different types of meetings. It’s best to figure out what your talking points are. Use an upfront contract in your talking points that includes the purpose, the time allotted, the intended agenda, and an opportunity for the group to add to the targeted agenda.

Make sure to end your up front contract with an outcome statement. Something like, “At the end of today's meeting, we should be in a position to do a couple different things. One, an action plan on how to move forward with X, Y, Z problem. Two, we'll also set the agenda up for our next meeting for reviewing progress on these items. Let's get started.”

By setting an up front contract, the sales manager takes control of that meeting. Maintaining ownership of the meeting depends on fulfilling that initial agreement. For example, if the set time is an hour, keep to your time contract. Don’t drift into an hour and a half or you risk other element of your meeting going similarly off track.

Staying focused on fulfilling the up front contract ensures that you can stick to the agenda. Since the agenda is specifically stated and the group agreed to that intended purpose, off topic items can be excluded from the conversation. If a topic outside the agenda is introduced, it’s up to the sales manager to stay on target by saying something like, “That is something that I’d like to discuss but it's not for today's meeting, right? I’ll make a note to set some time for us to discuss that in a future meeting.”

At the end of the meeting, make sure you summarize key takeaways. Restate the decisions and action steps so that the group can validate them. Is everyone in agreement with that summary? Was anything missed? Make sure that you get a set of decisions that the whole group agrees to.

After defining the next steps, attach some roles and responsibilities to each person. Who's doing what by when? Assigning it to a specific person helps instill a culture of accountability.

And then finally, after the end of the meeting, do a couple things.

Number one, debrief yourself. What could you have done differently. Did you get off track? Did you lose your patience? Did you not engage those who weren't participating?

Number two, do a follow-up. Provide an outline of what was discussed, the key findings, and next steps. Providing a follow up creates momentum by congruently linking the meeting to the people and their next steps. This reinforces that the discussion was not “conceptual” and tangible action is expected by the next scheduled meeting.

Sales leaders set the tone for their team, master the skills that support a great sales meeting. If you’re meetings are out of control and unfocused, don’t be surprised to find your team is running similar sales calls. But if you're productive, on target, and efficient, the team will tend toward emulating those behaviors. Not to mention both the sales and executive teams will have respect, confidence, and conviction in your ability to lead them toward strategic sales success.