The 3 meetings you need to run a successful sales team
The 3 meetings you need to run a successful sales team
Nobody loves meetings
Nobody loves internal meetings, least of all salespeople. After all, time spent in meetings is time taken away from selling.
With that in mind, here are the 3 recurring meetings that make the best use of everyone’s time and will actually help your salespeople do their jobs more effectively:
1. The 1:1 meeting
1:1 meetings between a salesperson and their manager can take many formats but I’ve found they are most effective when used to build trust, provide feedback and develop skills. You want to have this meeting weekly, at most bi-weekly.
Building trust is a two-way street. As a salesperson you need to come prepared with an agenda, follow through on your commitments and drive the meeting. As a sales manager you need to create a level of psychological safety to enable an honest discussion, otherwise the meeting will be reduced to a performative non-event of no use to either of you. Two great ways to build trust are 1) sharing stories of your own failures from your career and how you overcame them and 2) providing feedback (see below).
Providing feedback is also a two-way street. While it’s common for a manager to give feedback to a salesperson, the inverse is seldom the case as it often feels uncomfortable. You need to actively solicit it and make it part of your routine. Ethena does an excellent job of this and you can read more about how we do it here.
Developing skills works best when aligned to a coaching framework like REKS (Results, Effort, Knowledge, Skills), as a framework helps you diagnose the root cause and which skill to focus on in order to improve performance.
2. The pipeline meeting
The goal of a pipeline meeting is to develop individual forecasting accuracy by reviewing the status of individual deals and discussing what needs to happen to move the deal forward.
Teams with a small number of active deals (eg enterprise sales or early stage startups) can usually review their entire pipeline, however as the volume of deals grows, it’s most effective to prioritize by process stage (late stage first), amount (largest first) and timeframe (close date this month/quarter first). You also want to have this meeting weekly.
The deal data I like to review are:
Sales framework: If you are using a framework like SPICED or MEDDIC, you need to have clear descriptions for each of the fields in the framework. For example, if you are using SPICED and a deal has no Critical Event but is supposed to close this month, your close date is likely wrong.
Next step: The simple format for a next step is, Who is going to do What by When. As with framework fields, I like documenting next steps in Salesforce so that we can read them before the meeting and use the meeting for discussion rather than status updates.
Blocker: A good mantra for pipeline meetings is to “bring all opportunities forward”, as some deals will not slot nicely into your existing sales playbook. While sales managers can’t remove every blocker, hearing what they are enables you to spot training opportunities and gather feedback to improve your process and product.
Number of contacts: Deals with fewer than 2 contacts attached are always more likely to be lost unless the contact is both the champion and decision maker. It’s also valuable to add multiple contacts so that you can re-prospect them if you lose the deal or if they leave the company.
Age of deal: Wins always happen faster than losses, yet salespeople often get attached to stalled opportunities. If the age of an opportunity is more than 2x the average age of your closed won deals, it’s a sign that you need to close lost it and move on.
3. The sales team meeting
The goal of a sales team meeting can vary widely but is generally focused on learning, rather than accountability. This sets it apart from the 1:1 and pipeline meetings.
When your team is small you can get by without having this meeting because information will flow async, but at some point people will start missing things and a monthly meeting becomes useful. A typical agenda includes:
Wins: Discussing recent wins in the context of your sales framework is a great way for salespeople to learn from each other and develop confidence in using the framework.
Product updates: While product updates tend to happen every couple of weeks and get pushed out in separate meetings or slack channels, it’s a good idea to recap them and farm for questions.
Enablement updates: similar to product updates, it’s helpful to recap changes to sales materials and where to use them in the sales process.
Retrospectives: it’s a good practice to do a retro once a quarter where you summarize your key metrics for the period (eg volume of opps, win rate, ACV, sales cycle), along with win and loss reasons and product gaps.
What other types of meetings do you have in your sales team? I’d love to hear about them!
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