Let’s face it most sales meetings are boring.
You’re either sitting waiting trying to remember what you’re going to say or finding yourself losing concentration listening to everyone else’s story.
If you’re a sales manager, it’s time to stop this madness and make your meetings amazingly valuable for you and everyone on the team.
First, understand you need to have two types of ‘Sales Team Meetings’ a Forecast Meeting and a Pipeline Meeting.
It’s easy to dedicate a lot of time and energy to the exciting soon-to-close opportunities located at the bottom of your sales funnel. They are often where our focus is, as these potential orders are the ones we have forecast to come in this month and demand our attention.
But if your focus and discussions are only about the soon to close element of your pipeline, you’re missing out on a huge revenue generating opportunity.
Your Forecast meetings are great opportunities to talk with your salespeople about the deals they expect to close soon, but they are not the best time to talk about the general Pipeline health, which is determined by the quality and quantity of leads in the pipeline.
It’s important that you make this distinction and separate your Forecast meetings from your Pipeline meetings.
In your Pipeline meetings you need to ask your sales team about the new projects they have recently registered in your CRM. These early-stage sales opportunities are the ones that will have a larger overall impact on the company’s condition.
As a manager this is where you need to focus your energy as these earlier stage opportunities need your guidance and where you can add the most value in developing your team’s performance.
These pipeline meetings can also serve to educate the entire team on improving their sales opportunity qualification for example or how to ensure all the influencers and decision makers involved in an opportunity have been considered and communicated with.
By using these Pipeline meetings to review and discuss your ‘Must Win’ opportunities everyone can gain from the experience and best practices of others. Often, I find that someone on the team will have a relevant case study to share or knows of a useful contact that they can introduce to a colleague to help them on their sales opportunity.
By keeping your focus and energy on coaching opportunities earlier in the sales pipeline you can improve the skills of the team and improve the accuracy of the monthly sales forecast.
If you want to explore this and other areas to take your sales team performance to the next level, just drop me a line and let’s start a conversation.
peter.holland@linearstructure.com
Committed to Your Sales Success!
Peter
