Running Efficient Sales Meetings: 7 Best Practices

It’s almost impossible to think of an area within a company that doesn’t interact with or influence sales in some capacity. For something that is so important to successful business operations, we need to be paying it the attention it needs and deserves. A lot of this boils down to planning and preparation, which is usually done in sales meetings.

I want to break down these meetings together, with the aim of growing our understanding of these gatherings and learning 7 best practices and top tips to help you and your organization consistently ace your sales meetings. Let’s get straight into it!

Understanding Sales Meetings

What is the Purpose of a Sales Meeting?

Obvious answer - sales. In fact, there is a lot more that we aim (or should aim) to get out of our sales meetings. To expand our obvious answer, we want to enhance and enable the sales process in our companies by coming together and aligning the sales team’s goals and tactics, carrying out some performance review, and acting upon that to address any points of friction or challenges.

Less obvious answer - awareness and motivation. We can only begin to really drive strategies forward if we fully understand the targets and how we are going to achieve them. Coaching is a big part of this, whether targeted or just filtered through down the company’s culture in such a way that it becomes ingrained in employees. Companies don’t pay enough attention to this, and in fact, statistics from The Sales Management Association showed that a lowly 15% of respondents to their survey believe that their company or firm provides a sufficient amount of sales coaching.

Don’t fall into the trap of neglecting awareness of the strategy. This comes through having well set-up sales meetings, where every participant is on the same page. Also, as I mentioned, a good sales meeting structure serves to motivate the team, celebrate wins, and generally build a culture that is competitive while also collaborative.
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So, we now know the importance of sales meetings, and I’m sure you are itching to understand how you can be part of great sales meetings from here on in. With that in mind, it’s time for our 7 best practices. P.S. - Stick around afterwards for tips on creating effective sales meeting agendas and our answers to FAQs.

7 Best Practices for Running Efficient Sales Meetings

1. Set Clear Objectives

Clear objectives are something necessary in any great meeting, and for that reason, I feel like a broken record for repeatedly drumming this into our audience. However, there is a reason, and there is also a reason why this is our first tip. You simply cannot have a good sales meeting if every participant doesn’t extensively know the reason for meeting, the desired outcomes, and the plan for getting to them.

Whether you are meeting to introduce a new sales tactic, review the sales pipeline, or provide the sales coaching that I stressed as so important earlier, specific goals will guide you along the way and help maintain focus on the task at hand. Also, if you know what you want to achieve, you have a benchmark against which to measure the effectiveness of your sales meeting, both at the time it occurs and in the future.

2. Prepare and Circulate an Agenda in Advance

It’s all well and good having clear objectives in your head, but without them being well documented and ready to be shared, they aren’t much good to the meeting. If this is your responsibility, you should make sure the sales meeting agenda is prepared and circulated with the rest of the meeting’s participants well in advance of the meeting. Luckily for you, we have a separate blog where we uncover 7 different types of meeting agenda to help you smash this. Check this out here: 7 Key Types of Agendas, and check our more advanced tips on sales meeting agendas specifically at the end of these 7 best practices.

3. Using Technology for Better Sales Meetings

This goes hand in hand with sales meeting preparation, as the best professionals set themselves and their team up for success by adopting and utilizing the newest, freshest technology to enhance their meetings and sales processes. 

For meeting aid: You should be using an AI Notetaker within your sales meetings. Our personal favorite is Bubbles Notetaker, which will record, transcribe and summarize your sales meeting, before distributing it to all participants with their tailored action items. Bubbles also stands out by allowing for asynchronous conversations within the meeting recording area, which we found very helpful in terms of reducing the need for follow-up after sales meetings.

For sales process support: We recommend Scratchpad. This tool is designed to help your sales team update Salesforce more efficiently. By ensuring updates are clear before sales meeting time, Scratchpad helps to avoid a scenario where time is wasted on updates during the meeting itself, allowing the team to keep the conversation strictly strategic on sales. HubSpot reports that top sales performers spend 18% more time updating their CRM systems than average performers. Ensure this extra time is spent as efficiently as possible with a tool like Scratchpad.

It’s important to be proactive in any sales role, and optimizing your and your team’s processes through using the correct technology is a crucial part of this.

4. Be Positive and Interactive

Wherever possible, kick off the sales meeting with some positive news or a quick win. By doing so, you are going to set the tone for the session, which will likely be constructive. You will also boost the morale of your team, and make them more likely to be receptive to new information, ideas and strategies. Use wins to your advantage and intertwine them with your employee management skills.

Again, keeping things interactive is massively important for good sales meetings. Engage the whole sales team by asking questions, prompt individual sales reps to share insights or experiences from their point of view or organize an icebreaker or team-building activity within the hustle and bustle of the sales discussion. You want to keep energy and enthusiasm levels high, and these two tips will be your best shot at doing so.

5. Use Visual Aids and Real Data

It is likely that you are going to be planning how best to sell in this meeting, and one element you should consider is the use of visual aids (graphs/charts) and real data. Another HubSpot report claims that 79% of B2B sales pros who use sales enablement content say it's important to making a sale. This just emphasizes the importance of data-supported sales materials, so make sure that within your sales meetings, you are planning and preparing for the use of your own data and visuals. Not only will you seem more credible, you will keep your team focused and engaged, as well as your audience (when it comes to a sales pitch).

6. Regularly Review and Adjust Strategies

Adapt or die! As we mentioned, performance reviews should be ever-present in sales meetings, so that you can review strategies and their outcomes. You need to keep things fresh and relevant, so being mindful of this will encourage you and your team to continuously improve and adapt to market changes and shifts in demand, for example. As Charles Darwin famously said: “The species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”

7. Follow Up with a Summary and Action Items

Meeting notes are critical, but it brings me joy that I will never need to write this manually again. I wouldn’t like to laugh at the choices of other teams holding their meeting online, but if you are still scribbling notes throughout your sales meetings, you’ve got it all wrong. Let Bubbles Notetaker take care of all of this for you, and make sure you are being an example professional who is fully engaged and focussed throughout the entirety of the sales meeting. Bubbles automatically distributes the meeting notes, summary, and action items, and is free to use.

What to Include in a Sales Agenda?

Let’s revisit to strengthen our understanding! Your sales agenda should be structured to such an extent that it fully outlines the sales meeting while keeping some time flexibility for any sales roadblocks. Included within your sales agenda should be items such as time for reviewing objectives and key results (OKRs), which will include looking at key performance indicators (KPIs). You should also allow time for the discussion of any obstacles, updates on product development and strategic chats about how best to approach upcoming opportunities.

Aside from the content of the agenda, make sure the discussion sections are allocated an amount of time, and try to stick to this. Include all participants, and distribute the agenda to them beforehand, so that they can review it, give their feedback and prepare themselves for each discussion.

How to Make Sales Meetings More Fun

Especially when it comes to virtual meeting etiquette, it can be tricky to create a fun environment. However, this is really key to good collaboration and communication. Backed by Scavify, who claim that fun elements within virtual meetings can go a long way towards building strong team camaraderie, we also recognize the importance within a sales meeting environment.

Whether your ‘fun elements’ include the gamification of sales, such as sales contests, role-playing scenarios or some light hearted round-table discussions or sales-related icebreakers, you should be trying to implement something. As a result, you will probably help in reducing stress levels and the pressure that comes with sales.

Conclusion

Well done, you've reached the end and now have everything you need to excel in your sales meetings. By recognizing the purpose and importance of these gatherings, and giving our 7 best practices the attention they deserve, you can establish a strong sales culture. Transform your sales meetings from routine, mundane events into vital parts of your company’s overall success. Best of luck, and remember to use Bubbles!