I believe it is essential to your business to have your whole sales team moving ahead together so you can build momentum and motivation, beyond how you physically bring them together.
Most offices require the team to gather together on a weekly basis in what we call the sales meeting. Having worked with thousands of salespeople around the country and internationally, I can tell you the number one complaint is how long the sales meeting goes and whether or not it actually covers the right content to make it a really powerful meeting.
A key challenge is to decide the best timing to ensure it is effective. This depends on the type of culture within your organisation. If lots of salespeople don’t have dependents and can be there early, then you might like to run your sales meeting before the business day starts, at 7:30am or 8am. If, however, several people must drop children off at school, then consider running your sales meeting later in the morning at around 9 or 10am.
Here’s a great idea for you. The most critical thing is that your salespeople are actually making sales. And the number one sale opportunity every day is for them to be booking appointments. To create success you want your people prospecting more often. So what about spending the first 45 minutes of your meeting getting every sales agent on the phone prospecting together? From experience, this is a terrific activity to amp it up.
You can just bring everyone into the boardroom with their mobile phones and a simple printout of the potential sellers, market appraisals or buyers they are following up to convert them to listing opportunities.The magic thing about doing this together is that you get everyone on the phone. You can set a timer on an iPad to count down 45 minutes. Then have each agent measure their total number of calls, connects and appointments at the end. There are two huge benefits – instant results and a shared, team culture around prospecting. You’ll always have some people who feel uncomfortable with this, but I’d say then at least we know that you must build their skill in this area. Ultimately there is nothing like getting it done and getting it done early so that your people can build more confidence more often.
To build a great culture in your business it is critically important that everyone actually understands what you are doing in order to make that sales meeting really effective. So I’d like you to get your salespeople prepared. What are the things that they need to bring to the table to ensure a great sales meeting? I would suggest they bring a list of their existing stock on your stock control sheet, which records key information such as inquiries, inspections, second appointments, contract requests and offers that they’ve received. Have them think about what the owner’s expectations are in relation to the sale price and what is the current market feedback?
Now I’d ask them to give that sheet to you the day before the meeting, so as the sales manager you can review their stock and highlight a few case studies to discuss at the meeting. Ultimately, a sales meeting is exactly meant for that. It’s designed to make sales. So your salespeople need to leave that meeting feeling more energetic and more driven about what matters to them to make sales. So you must think about “How am I going to make my people feel?”
I also like to run the sales meeting to time, so I put a 45-minute timer on and we work to that timeframe. It’s amazing how the energy shifts when everyone knows we have a deadline. We all get more energetic in the meeting and focused on what we could be doing. You must think about it as a training meeting too, where you have the opportunity to help people think more long term and more reflectively about what to spend their time on. When are they taking holidays? What goals are they looking to achieve at the moment? What have they achieved in the last few weeks? What is the number one issue right now that we could help to resolve before next week’s meeting to get them back on track?
At the end of the day, YOU create your business culture and most importantly the energy within it. You do that by engaging with your people and getting them to connect to the values that matter. You must think about how you make your people feel and how can you help them do more of the activities more often that will produce income. I can tell you that in the greatest businesses I get to work with everyone’s making money, but more importantly there’s good energy and focus on what’s critically important – and that comes from helping everyone to achieve their goals and their dreams for their life.
I look forward to connecting with you again soon!