The Sales Pro Insider Building Performance Profits and People

Want your meetings to stick?  Listen to Sales Meeting Best Practices, podcast on Salesopedia.com.  Clayton Shold interviews Alice Kemper and me on why sales meeting effectiveness is important today.  And some tips to make them helpful!

Listen for Sales Meeting Best Practices

While you are on the Salesopedia site, look around!  There is a lot of wisdom and sales tool ideas to help you end 2009 with a BANG!

Filed Under: Leadership, Sales, Sales Meeting

Continuing the week with tips on running effective meetings… An acronym to use for ensuring your meeting is worthwhile, is STICK.   

Employees around the world feel “meeting’ed out”.  They go from meeting to meeting to meeting without time to get their work done.  So the “work’ is rushed or addressed at night.  So how do you ensure that your meeting isn’t dreaded?  Well, the employees I spoke with stated that they will willingly make time for a meeting if there is something in it for them – developmentally or to help them be more productive.  That means including more than operation and product updates in your meeting format.   

Much meeting information can be shared with memos, emails, quick update phone calls, without taking up valuable time.  The goal should be for a ‘live’ meeting is for it to stick! 

With stickiness as a key outcome, the STICK acronym provides a framework for planning a productive sales meeting.  Using these ideas will help remove the Teflon-effect (slides right out of mind) of a boring meeting.  

  S  – Sharpen their skills, behaviors or attitudes.  Give your people opportunity to share experiences and best practices.  Don’t make the meeting just about information.  Use the time to BUILD your team for future success.  Incorporate 20-30 minutes each meeting for this proactive activity.
   T – Timely.  Is the information and the discussion relevant to what is important today?  Don’t hold all information you have until the meeting. If you have a lot of “little” things to cover, prepare a short handout to distribute at the end of the meeting or send an email prior to the meeting.  During your meeting do not READ the handout to them – or worse – the PPT slides!  Save your meeting time for the most meaningful topics and discussion.
   I – Inclusive/Interactive.  Put more ask instead of tell into your meeting format.  Engage and involve their expertise in topics and experiences.  With involvement comes a better sense of ownership and team.  Some business people spend a lot of time alone, and realizing that their team has similarities helps them stay connected to the company, which leads to retained employees.
   C – Communicative.  Sharing relevant information is important; asking for information back even more so.  Plan ahead and allow others to present information or lead discussion and activity.  Let the information be two-way.
   K – Kinetic.  Adults need to DO – to take action and build information into their consciousness and habits.  Help them make the information actionable.  End every meeting with each person committing to ONE action they will take to apply the information discussed.  If they have no commitments, why were they in the meeting?

With a little planning and the STICK acronym followed, your team will willingly participate in your meetings.  They will skip down the hall on the way, bring YOU a cup of coffee, silence their BlackBerry and have positive thoughts in their heads as they join the meeting.  More importantly, the information will stick and result in higher productivity after the meeting!

Want help with meetig content that sticks?  Our Sharpenz..half hour of power sales boosters are ready when you are!  And you can download a FREE sales booster today!  Visit www.sharpenz.com .

Filed Under: Sales, Sales Meeting

Today is a HUGE day for me.  I’ve pushed the launch button on a new venture, Sharpenz…half hour of power sales boosters. 

I’ve collaborated with Alice Kemper of Sales Training Consultants to bring a training tool to the world!  It’s been in the works for over a year! 

We whittled our comprehensive sales training expertise into specific 30-minute boosts of power!  Then we piloted, had focus groups, tested again, and then added even more value with reinforcement tips!  

We have over two dozen titles now available – with many more in development! 

Of course, to build excitement, we have two special offers:

1.  A FREE Sharpenz booster for you – you can select one of two titles:

        Better Questions which focuses on helping you idnetify and practice better questions you can ask in your needs analysis and problem solving.  Or

       Now to Wow provides a very interactive format for your team to look at all your customer “touch points” and determine how to escalate these touches to a WOW! experience.

2.  All orders through November 15th are discounted 50%!

If you want to hear me explain a little more about Sharpenz – I’ve even put together my first video!  (Really, this was one of  the most challenging pieces of this whole launch…I think there were 27 takes…and some of the “peppy and fun” Nancy was a little lost in the end….)   What makes the video even funnier to me is that when I was in NYC last week, I was selected to be one of the ‘volunteers’ for the NBC Studio Tour where I was the weather girl.  Now, without pressure THAT was a lot of fun (I even included a little weather dance.) 

I digress, back to Sharpenz.  We have tested each booster in the 30 minute format to make sure you do get a big BOOST in a little time. 

To honor the need for GREAT meetings, the rest of this week will focus on effective meetings. 

Today’s quick  tip for effective team meetings:

      Have a specific objective for your meeting.  Plan your agenda in advance to identify how much time you need for the topic at hand. 

P.S. Sales Pro Insider, Inc. is alive and well.  In fact, we are working right now with two Fortune 100 companies to build sales and service skills  and helping another sales organization hire a KEY sales exec!

Let me know what you think of Sharpenz!  Do you think you can sharpen skills and results in just 30 minutes?

Filed Under: Sales Meeting, Sales training