The purpose of a sales meeting is to motivate your people and get them prepared to focus on selling. All too often sales meetings become boring lectures, repetitive messages that really have nothing to do with selling your products, and then becomes a source of de-motivation rather than motivation and increased sales. Sales meetings that are unplanned are punishment for those that have to attend.
Sales meetings should be delivered every day and provide the team with information that gives them new hope and new solutions that will help them in increasing business. Most companies agree with daily sales meetings but then don't have them because they lack fresh and compelling content and soon find the meetings to be a waste of time. For sales meetings to be effective you must invest time and energy in making them interesting over and over again. The purposes of the meeting is not for the sake of a sales meeting but to: (1) Bring the team together and get cohesiveness as a selling team. (2) To motivate and provide the sales and management with hope of what is possible. (3) Prepare individual sales people with new techniques and solutions that will actually increase sales.
These meetings must be kept fresh, motivating, engage the audience and be upbeat. It's important that you don't waste your salespeoples' time, but also avoid overloading them with information that is just information. The meeting should be short, inspiring, provoking, positive and focused on SOLUTIONS! The key to almost any successful meeting is to make it interesting, useful, positive and short. Short means under twenty minutes.
Before you rally the troops for another sales meeting, consider some of the following ways to get the most out of your sales meetings:
a) Get the meeting off to a jump start and surprise your team with visual content that sets the stage and grabs their full attention. Use high impact video to make points, something that can really wake them up and get your team thinking. Here is an example of a wake up video called, You Can't Handle the Truth Sales Meeting. Don't just talk to people get their senses engaged, get them focused, and wakes them up! The major goal of the sales meeting is to offset the massive amounts of negative information your team has received in the last 24 hours from mass media.
b) Once you have their full attention then next focus on 'saving' business that was worked over the last days or weeks. The goal here is to get them thinking how we as a team can piece a transaction together and get the day started on a fast track.
c) Focus on the 'wins not the losses! Take a few minutes at every meeting to congratulate salespeople for any and all completed goals, closed deals, and successes. Praise reinforces positive behavior and encourages everyone to do well. Keep the discussion relevant and don't allow people to present problems unless they also have potential solutions.
Sales meetings should be daily, short, engaging, entertaining and interesting and focused on solutions and the positive not the negative. Your people are being trained whether you train them or not. The question is will you provide them with sales training daily or will you let the media train them. An effective sales meeting will motivate, entertain, engage and get your people focused on how to conquer sales. An effective sales meeting done on a daily basis will prove a great investment of time and energy when done correctly.
SALESPERSON. What does it really mean?
Wikipedia defined it as a person representing an organization or person in business.
Thesaurus offered a couple of synonyms like abettor, assignee, attorney, broker, commissioner, doer, executor, go-between, handler, negotiator, operator, proctor, promoter, salesperson.
Finally, the very dependable Mr. Webster defined salesperson as a person employed to sell merchandise (as to customers in a store or to customers that are visited).
Now for my highly intellectual definition (at least that’s the way my wife puts it).
Let’s break it into two parts.
Sales – a transaction involving a transfer or exchange of goods/services/merchandise that has an equivalent value to both parties often relating to a transfer of money.
Person – Human being/individual/someone/personality. Obviously we all know what a person is, unless you are a 3-yr old kid who hasn’t started school yet.
Add it up together and we’ll easily get the definition of a Salesperson which is an individual who ensures the proper and successful transaction of the exchange in goods with the equivalent money. In other words, he is the one who is doing the actual selling process (more on this on my next blogs) and bringing home the bacon for the company.
However, only a few people have discovered the fact that all of us have the ability to sell. In fact, in most of the routine things we do in a day, we are actually “selling”. We sell stories to our friends like gossiping about actors daily and trying to “persuade” them to believe us by using what we heard from Kris Aquino or Boy Abunda (like the change in love teams between Bea Alonzo/John Lloyd to Sarah Geronimo/John Lloyd). Like the way wives convince their husbands in buying stuff for the house (c’mon, when does an expensive vase became a necessity?) Or when we arrive home late, stinking like we just came out of a beer bath and still we painstakingly convince our wives that we just had a few drinks after work when in fact it took us an hour just to start the car. Heck, even our kids “sales talk” their way on us when they need a new Transformers toy that their classmates already have.
Personally, I consider selling as a day to day activity that it is almost how human life revolves. When we transfer our ideas to another person regardless if he receives it or not, it is already a kind of sales call.
My point - we are all Salespersons in our little way, we are just not that aware of it. But as long as there is an exchange of ideas, we are selling and we are earning whether it is a person’s trust, love, a toy, and for the common aspect of a Salesperson - money.
Well, that’s it for today. Be sure to leave your email addresses and click to follow button so you can get my newsletter updates.
That's it for today, I hope to hear from you in the future.
Dedicated to you selling success!
Sales Mentor TM
Have you ever heard these following questions?
If these are the kind of questions you think about daily, then we are currently in the same shoes – the Sales and Direct Marketing business.
I am writing this to you; to those sales people who have experienced the hardships, the happiness, the pain and as well as the great rewards of being a sales person.
Whether you are selling a popular product or trying to sales talk your mother to let you take her car to the party - I’ll be your online sales guide and sales mentor. Together, we will learn the scientific and proven techniques to effectively persuade our “customers” and have a blast practicing and applying what we have learned.
That's it for now, you will be hearing from me on the next coming days.
Dedicated to your selling success!
Sales Mentor Online
