Your reminder comes up on your computer that it’s time for your sales team meeting. Are you feeling energized or is this just another waste-of-time meeting on your schedule?

Sales meetings are fundamental to any successful sales operation. But recent studies show there is often misalignment when it comes to meeting effectiveness. Steven Rogelberg conducted a survey on industry professionals and found alarming statistics such as:

• 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work
• 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient

With that in mind, you shouldn’t stick to your same-old meeting schedule just because that’s what you’re comfortable with. Openness to new strategies and ideas can benefit your team and the overall outcome of your sales meetings. That’s why we collected some highly-effective sales meeting ideas for you to try on for size.

Before we begin, let’s go over the basics that we don’t want to bore you with, but are necessary for all meetings:

• Set clear objectives for your meeting
• Send out the agenda to all participants before the meeting occurs
• Schedule your meetings on a consistent day of the week so employees get into a routine

Now let’s get into some specific ideas that will benefit your team’s thinking, stimulation, and overall meeting productivity.

Our Top Sales Meeting Ideas:

Identify who leads each topic

On your meeting agenda, identify who leads each topic so each employee comes in prepared and ready to lead their portion of the discussion.

Here’s an example:

Send this agenda out at least 24 hours in advance so every participant can plan and show up ready to present their piece with confidence. This will ultimately speed up the process, provide more insightful information, and keep the meeting organized and structured.

List agenda topics as questions

For agenda topics that aren’t assigned to an employee, but need to be addressed, try listing each as a question. Studies show that listing agenda topics as questions increases team participation.

This will show that you want to hear employee’s input rather than telling them what to do, which helps them feel more involved and willing to speak up. This ultimately leads to a more thorough group discussion.

Here’s an example:

Lastly, this sales meeting idea will help you stay on schedule. Designate a specific amount of time you will spend on each question. If you find a consensus answer within that period of time, the discussion is over and you’re onto the next agenda topic. If the question is taking too long to resolve, the manager needs to determine whether to continue the conversation or take it offline.

Start the meeting with recognizing success

Countless studies show the power of employee recognition. Starting off your meeting on a positive note and taking a few minutes to recognize success can go a long way.

Gallup’s report on the workplace shows that only one in three employees in the U.S. strongly agree that they received recognition or praise for doing good work in the past week. But psychology studies emphasize the power of appreciation and how it affects the brain.

Dopamine, also known as the “reward neurotransmitter,” is heavily affected by feelings of gratitude. And studies of the brain have found that high levels of dopamine increase your motivation and willingness to work hard.

That being said, try recognizing your employee’s success at the beginning of your meetings and see how it improves the mood and overall tone of the meeting.

Hold a brainstorm session

If you’re not holding brainstorm sessions in your meetings, you’re missing out.

This slide comes from one of our current meeting presentations, and a lot of great ideas were formed in this short 4-minute spam.

Try this out: propose a problem or question that lacks a solution or answer. Put a timer on and let each employee write down their ideas, then go around the room and hear what each of them came up with. The more ideas that come up, the more stimulation is increased and before you know it creative ideas are bouncing off the walls.

We’re certain you will be surprised at how many employees are holding in ideas or not speaking up. When given the opportunity to address a problem with a brainstorm session, their inner creativeness comes out.

An effective brainstorming strategy: emphasize to your team that the brainstorm is about quantity, not quality. Don’t evaluate each idea and let them keep flowing. Save the evaluation for after the meeting or hold a separate meeting to narrow down the list, but don’t evaluate in the original brainstorm. This will prevent employees from holding back any out-of-the-box ideas.

Provide visuals

Psychology studies show how powerful visuals are in learning. Studies show that our brain is mainly an image processor, not a word processor. This is because much of our sensory cortex is devoted to vision.

The brain retains visuals much easier than words, and they stick in your brain effortlessly. So, providing images and visuals in your meetings can improve comprehension and the ability to accurately retrieve the content.

For example: rather than discuss your funnel, view it.

 

Bonus Tip: For Yesware users, you can instantly visualize what’s working across your team with Yesware’s Reports & Dashboards for Salesforce. Click here to install 4 free reporting dashboards by Yesware – visualize email, call, and calendar activity across your sales team. And see how their activity leads to outcomes like meetings booked and closed-won revenue.      

 

From this dashboard, you can grab images and visuals to show in your meetings, such as closed-won revenue and by user. This helps visualize how the team is doing and whether your graphs are looking like they’re increasing and progressing, or declining.

Don’t overlook this tip. There are countless psychology studies that have confirmed the power of visual imagery in learning. Although it may take more time to prepare, the results are worth it.

Share insider insights

Sales meetings are a great time to share insights and learn from one another. Scheduling time to share new insights or reflect on something each person learned that week can benefit the whole team.

For sales reps – share prospecting techniques that are and are not working, insights on competitors and competitor landscape, and important feedback received.

For sales managers – this is a great time to share business insights with your team such as product updates and insights from exec or higher management meetings. As a sales manager, you’re up-to-date with the current business insights, so share this with your team.

And sales managers can share best practices as well – it all helps. Share what you’re seeing that’s working and share what’s not working as a team (individual feedback should be saved for 1:1s – nobody likes to be called out in front of their peers.)

Leave time at the end of the meeting for questions and addressing blockers

At the end of your meeting, it can be effective to go around the room and have anyone draw light on any roadblocks they’re experiencing so sales managers can address these and progress can continue.

At the end of your meeting, it can be very useful to leave 5 minutes for questions so no employee leaves confused with unanswered questions. On your agenda, always leave some time for questions because you want everyone leaving with clear and energized mindsets.

It’s never too late to change up your weekly meetings. Try out some of these sales meeting ideas in your next meeting. We have a feeling you might just see a boost in productivity and overall more motivated sales reps.

Make meetings worth the time.