It’s 10 minutes past the time for the sales meeting to start.
Members of your sales team are still trickling in, looking disinterested and downright annoyed to be there.
What’s going on?
You need a sales meeting agenda template to add guidance and value to your time together.
Here’s what you need to know.
Why you need a sales meeting agenda
A sales meeting agenda keeps your meetings on track, engages the team, and prevents tangents that detract from the value of the meeting.
Winging it doesn’t work.
It’s the reason meetings have earned a bad rap as a waste of time.
Going in with a sales meeting agenda keeps you on track, ensures the team stays engaged and prevents those rabbit trails that can hijack an otherwise worthwhile session.
Let’s take a look at why you need a sales meeting agenda template to follow:
- It’ll keep the team intensely focused on the most critical priorities.
- It increases accountability for both the team and individuals.
- It expose issues that may be holding the team back.
- It helps to organize the discussion around finding solutions that work.
Now that you know it’s a necessary step, let’s take a look at what your sales meeting agenda template should include.
Side Note: If you think this is a lot like an EOS Level 10 meeting, you’re right!
Sales meeting agenda template
What are the features of a sales meeting agenda template?
- An introductory ice breaker
- Metrics dashboard
- Pipeline updates
- Issue resolution updates/General housekeeping
- New Issues: Identify, Discuss, Solve
- Training
- Closing
Here are the elements you should include in your sales meeting agenda, and that you need to take notes on.
1. An introductory ice-breaker
Spend about five minutes having everyone share, in 30 seconds or less, a high-point of the previous week for BOTH personal and professional experiences. For example: My new puppy is officially house trained, and I closed the XYZ opportunity!
Keep it brief, light, and positive – with bonus points for laughter.
2. Metrics dashboard
Cover important sales metrics in each meeting.
Not an in-depth analysis, but rather a quick overview of the metrics dashboard for both the team overall and each individual.
Everyone needs to be on-page with where the team is, and where each other is in relation to goals.
Make sure the metrics you’re looking at are tied directly to the organization’s overall goals, as well.
Note:
This is NOT the time to call out individuals. Save that for one-on-one meetings. The purpose is transparency on what everyone should already know about their own performance and the impact their performance is having on the team.
3. Pipeline updates
Each team member shares status on their pipeline’s overall with focus on their best and most challenging opportunity.
This gives everyone on the team visibility into what’s working, as well as where they may be able to apply their experience to help others.
It’s also helpful for prioritizing activity for the week ahead.
4. Issue resolution updates/General housekeeping
This is the time to give updates on open-task assignments in order to solve issues brought up in the prior weeks, as well as quick updates on other company initiatives, announcements, changes in policy, updates on processes, etc.
Keep it brief! Save the deep dives for the time allocated to training.
5. New Issues
Once everyone is up-to-date on the current status, it’s natural to jump into the challenges that have come up over the past week.
I like the EOS model of Identify, Discuss, Solve:
- Identify:
Get all the issues everyone has out on the table. This is like a
brainstorming session: no filtering, no blaming or diving into details,
just the issue. And it includes everything from being short-staffed
during vacations to major technology failures and competitor activity.
- A good example: Engineering response time is too slow.
- Bad example: Every time I request technical support from Joe I never get anything for days and days, and it’s killing my pipeline. It’s like he just doesn’t care. The XYZ opportunity is about to die because… (you get the point).
- Discuss: Once the issues are on the table, pick the ONE biggest hurdle, and talk it out. This is the time for everyone who has an idea to chime in with BOTH a “here’s how I see the issue” AND “here’s what I think we should do about it” approach. Provide the entire team the opportunity to contribute to a solution.
- Solve: Review all the “here’s what we should do about it” ideas, and map a path forward to solve the issue. Assign tasks with ownership and due dates as needed. The issue stays on your Issue list, and is brought up each week in #4 until it is solved..
6. Training
Your team will dread this time together if your sales meeting agenda template doesn’t include some deep content of immediate value.
Determine the areas where overall knowledge, skill, or execution are hindering success, and train up the team to overcome it.
This IS the time to dive deep into self-limiting attitudes and beliefs, new tools, updated processes, product knowledge, etc.
Provide actionable tips and best practices to address the skill, knowledge, and execution gaps and make sure you send them off with a game-plan for tackling them.
7. Closing
Wrap up the meeting by re-emphasizing the most important points, including action items and strategies for the week.
Recap the wins/highs that were shared to reinforce the habits and behaviors you want your team to work toward.
Make sure everyone understands what their tasks are for the coming week and end the meeting on time.
Have everyone score the meeting, on a scale of 1 to 10, to see if the meeting was an effective use of their time.
After the meeting, publish the notes from the meeting, so tasks, issues, priorities, etc. are in writing for everyone.
Put your sales meeting agenda template to work for you
Following a sales meeting agenda template with consistency has the power to take your meetings from dreaded-waste-of-time to productive, energizing, value-packed sessions.
Taking the time to set up your sales meeting agenda will save you time – and money. And a structure will let your team know what to expect each week when you come together.
Here’s a template you can use to get started, but make it your own and tweak it to fit your team.
If you need a strategist or an executor to pinpoint your broken systems and create a plan for long-term sales success and business growth, get in touch with Sidehill Consulting today.