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If you have a sales team or are considering building one, at some point you will need to figure out how (and whether) you want to conduct group sales team meetings. This article answers some frequently asked questions about sales team meetings.

How often should sales team meetings be held?

I’m not a big fan of regularly scheduled sales team meetings. I find it boring to go person-by-person and discuss the status of specific opportunities, the percentage each individual is to quota, etc.

It’s one thing if a salesperson is doing something unusual or unique in pursuit of an opportunity and sharing what they are doing would constitute a good learning experience for other salespeople. However, I usually find that most discussions concerning individual opportunities are not very enriching for the other sales team members.

My philosophy is I prefer to bring the sales team together on an ad hoc basis when there is something to discuss that would benefit the entire team. This could be for sales training, product training, important announcements, etc.

With that said, if a sales team is more junior, or if you are in the process of changing your sales culture, or if you want to teach all of your salespeople a specific new skill, then regularly scheduled training meetings can make sense. However, if a sales team is more seasoned, or if it has a mix of people with substantially different levels of knowledge and experience, working with salespeople one-on-one tends to be more productive than group meetings.

How often should I meet individually with salespeople?

If a salesperson is achieving or exceeding quota, I like to schedule a weekly, one-hour meeting. The focus of this meeting is to:

• Discuss the progress (or lack thereof) of pipeline opportunities
• Discuss new opportunities that have been identified
• Strategize how to best pursue key opportunities

Often the greatest value a sales manager can add when dealing with a productive salesperson is suggesting creative ideas for advancing opportunities through the sales cycle more quickly.

For salespeople who are NOT achieving quota (including new salespeople), I suggest that management schedule one-hour meetings as frequently as necessary (including daily) to help the salesperson get on track. Going on “buddy calls” also provides great opportunities to observe the salesperson in action.

In these meetings the focus should be on determining:

• The quantity and quality of the salesperson’s activities
• Whether their activities are producing the desired results
• Sources of and solutions for any challenges they are running into

When performance issues are identified, conducting repetitive role plays is often the most productive way for management to help the salesperson become more comfortable executing specific skills and approaches properly. As the salesperson becomes more comfortable with, and more effective at executing, key steps in the sales process, meeting frequency can be reduced until you get to a single, scheduled, one-hour meeting each week.

Should members of the marketing team attend sales team meetings?

Absolutely… especially if you are trying to instill a “one team” mindset.

When hosting a joint meeting that includes both Sales and Marketing representatives, try to focus the meeting agenda on information that will help the members of the two organizations understand each other better and work together more effectively to produce the desired end result (which is usually increased sales, higher profits, etc.). For example:

• If marketing is conducting a campaign to generate sales leads, there should be discussion about what constitutes a qualified lead
• If marketing would like the sales team to report information to help marketing gauge the effectiveness of a campaign, there should be discussion about:
• The information that is being requested
• Whether the sales team is the best resource to provide the requested information
• Why marketing needs the information
• The accountability sales management will ask the salespeople to accept related to providing the requested information
• The frequency with which the information needs to be provided
• How sales management will inspect to ensure that the necessary information is being provided in a consistent and timely fashion

There could be many other agenda items, but they will generally fit under one of two umbrellas: (1) helping Sales and Marketing understand each other better, and (2) helping Sales and Marketing work together more effectively.

Conclusion

You have probably attended many meetings that did not feel like productive uses of your time. Don’t repeat this mistake with your sales team! Be very clear about your desired outcome(s) for each specific meeting. If you keep the desired outcome(s) firmly in mind, it should be relatively easy to determine who should attend each meeting and whether it should be a group or individual meeting.

Throughout time we all come across people who like to talk about their closing ratios. If you are just hearing percents being tossed around, the comments are probably coming from a sales rep who may think he/she is irreplaceable!

What is in a closing ratio? The experienced business owner will know immediately that it is not just the percent of sold vs the number of possibilities that tells whether or not a sales rep is profitable. Sometimes that same owner or manager may not be able to tell you exactly why, but their gut tells them whether or not a sales rep is profitable.

What should we examine? Well, for starters, if you are a company that pays for leads to come in the door, those leads vary in cost. If you have a sales rep that is given expensive leads and a sales rep that is given inexpensive leads, the one given expensive leads will have to either sell at a higher close rate or close at a higher price. If you are giving leads that cost minimal to nothing, the close rate or sale amount of the next person does not have to be as high.

Let’s take an example: Paul and Mark are salesmen. Paul has been given 50 leads that cost about $100 each, or $5000 worth of leads. Mark has been given 50 leads that cost $50 each, or $2500 worth of leads. If they both close 30 leads, they both have a 60% closing ratio. If their contract sizes are the same, Mark has been more profitable for us because we have spent half as much on advertising for his sales as we did for Paul.

Of 50 leads again, if Paul’s closed five leads at $30,000 each, he made $150,000 in gross revenues at a 10% closing ratio. On the same token, if Mark sold 30 leads at $3000 each, he had a 60% closing ratio and gross revenues of $90,000. If we were looking at just the closing ratio, we would say Mark is our high closer, but in reality Paul should be considered the “high” closer. It is his closes that are bringing in better revenues.

Now the trick for you as an owner or manager is to use the data you collect to your benefit in growing your business. We need to step up Paul’s closing ratio because he is bringing in the higher contracts. Put a high close and high contract together and you get some winning numbers. On the same token, find out why Mark is not getting higher price sales. Could it be that he is timid in asking for a sale on higher price products or services? Step over the timidness, put the shoulders back and ask for bigger sales! Increased prices with his closing ratio, and you will see increased revenues.

The whole purpose of tracking closing ratios is so that you have some system in place to hire, fire, train and assign. Hire based on the fact that you will track salesperson effectiveness on items other than just a simple closing ratio; fire based on the fact that if expectations are not filled by the numbers that tell the story, then they are shown the door. Training can be adjusted when you start to see trends within the sales team or individuals. Lead assignment can certainly be streamlined when you see salesperson strengths and weaknesses, and you can clearly see that certain people sell certain leads or types of sales better than others.