Sales Meeting Ideas To Keep Your Team 75% More Sharp & Motivated - Sales CRM, Marketing, Social, All-In-One

Last updated on August 9th, 2023

Today, we’ll explore the different ways of running sales meetings and making them impactful, resulting in a more driven sales team culture.

Most know that sales meetings are a cornerstone to continuous staff development.

But many forget that there’s an art form to making sales meetings engaging, memorable, and exciting (to maximize what everyone gets from the meeting).

This guide will give you practical sales meeting ideas to make all your meetings evermore valuable.

We’ll go over:

What Are Sales Meetings & Why Are They Held?
How Do You Prepare For A Sales Meeting?: A 5-Step Checklist
What Do You Do In A Sales Meeting?
How Do You Make A Sales Meeting Fun?
How Do You Run A Good Sales Meeting?
CRM Sales Reporting For Your Sales Meetings

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What Are Sales Meetings & Why Are They Held?

Sales meetings are scheduled company gatherings where a sales team does the following:

Goes over important information
Sales training
Builds relationships
Forecasts deals
Strategy development, and implementation
Fix sales roadblocks
Discuss future events

Sales meetings are held because with many things going on, sales directors, managers, and reps have to be on the same page and up to date.

You’ll find sales meetings to have other benefits for your organization, including:

Boosting staff performance
Keeping company morale high
Motivating staff members
Shortening product and sales knowledge gaps

How Do You Prepare For A Sales Meeting?: A 5-Step Checklist

1. Have A Clear Objective

72% say setting crystal-clear objectives is the key to successful meetings.

Your objective is what you want your staff to gain from the meeting (a sentence or two that explains what you want the outcome of the meeting to be).

All too often, sales meetings happen without a clear goal. And without a clear goal, the meeting may just be seen as a burden or waste of time rather than something valuable.

Here are some questions that are related to forming a meeting objective:

“What are some takeaways I want my team to have?”

“What “main idea” do I have to share?”

“Why am I meeting with my sales team today?”

“What problem(s) will we fix by the end of the meeting?”

With an objective always in place, every meeting will be valuable, and staff will more than likely look forward to and be engaged in future meetings.

2. Create An Agenda

According to one survey, 67% mentioned that a clear agenda is essential for a meeting to be good and productive.

Sales meetings should have an agenda, and it’s ideal for the person running the meeting to think through the agenda.

An agenda is a list of topics, activities, and collaborations that will go on during the meeting.

Each part of your agenda should, in some way or another, contribute to your grand objective.

Many companies send agenda notes before meetings, so everyone knows what will happen and prepare accordingly.

Here are some agenda questions to add to your repertoire:

“Will there be a roll call before the meeting starts?”

“When are questions taken (during presentations, or at the end)?”

“Who will be leading different parts of the sales meeting?”

3. Provide Documents & Resources

There’s a high chance that a good chunk of your sales meeting will have some resources to share.

It’s ideal to have these prepared and ready to go in the right quantity (enough for everyone).

If you’re doing a sales meeting over electronic communications, be sure to share these resources via the company email or whatever communication platform you use.

Powerpoints are essential too, some of your staff may not retain all the knowledge you spoke about so sending the powerpoint is a great way for them to review information.

4. Set Time & Time block

Employees spend an average of 31 hours every month in unproductive meetings.

You hear it all the time…

“The meeting went longer than we thought” or “*insert name* was late, so we had a delay.”

If some meetings start a little later or run a little longer from time to time, it’s not the end of the world.

But if it’s a consistent issue, then setting concrete start and end times and sticking to them should do the trick.

On top of that, have time blocks for the specific things on your agenda.

For example, if your sales meeting is 1 hour and 30 minutes, do a sales role-play exercise set for strictly 35 minutes.

In that 35 minute window, be sure to include questions staff may have and maybe even quick breaks.

With recurring meetings, try having them on the same day and hour(s) if it’s once per week, as it will help your team ingrain the time slot as a habit.

5. Send Materials Days Ahead Of Time

Lastly, it’s ideal to send necessary materials ahead of time in a reliable way. These can be the meeting agenda, contest announcements, a new sales playbook, and more.

What’s a good timeframe?

2-3 days before the meeting so that if some people don’t receive your email, you can resend it.

Also, make sure your subject line clearly says what the email is about:

“IMPORTANT: Resources for sales meeting on xx/xx/xx”

What Do You Do In A Sales Meeting?

Discuss Your Past, Current, & Future Deals

Your deals are what your reps work on day in and day out to bring more customers to your business.

So it goes without saying: deals are a prominent discussion!

Discuss what deals were won or lost in the past week, what deals are currently in the pipeline, and even big deals to come.

VipeCloud’s Sales CRM lets you easily pull up your pipeline stages and analyze your results from past weeks and months!

And by syncing with your marketing platforms, you get a streamlined CRM experience.

With your sales data shown, go over each deal and ask the reps responsible for the deal how things are going and what they could use help with.

You could give your sales reps some action plans they can do that week to move the deal along!

Also, encourage other reps to chime in if they have feedback from a similar deal.

When finding a solution to a problem, you can use the 4 levels of inquiry model called ORID:

Objective – Putting together data, stats, and numbers – this provides context (your sales CRM report.)

Reflective – A response and explanation to the data. Your reps can go through their thought process at the time when they spoke to a certain prospect in your CRM.

Interpretive – Further questioning, going deeper into what’s said. “Based on what you said, what else can you do to move this deal forward?”

Decisional – Determined action, coming to conclusions that will move things forward based on the 3 previous steps.

Talk About Roadblocks

Sales roadblocks can be general recurring problems your team is facing.

During the sales meeting, different people can mention what they’re struggling with, which allows an open discussion to find a solution.

Sales managers and leaders can also list common issues and mention solutions they’ve found that worked.

This can be related to objection handling; sales call best practices, lead distribution, and even sales confidence.

Briefing your team in this fashion helps them work on things they may not have known they were struggling with.

Share Product, Company, Industry News & Current Events

Some industries like technology, medicine, and marketing (just to name a few) are fast-paced and ever-changing.

On top of that, if your company seems to make product upgrades month in and month out, talking about these updates ahead of time is crucial.

Why?

It gives your staff time to learn about new features and explain them in detail when speaking to customers.

Company news as a whole should also be discussed because it ensures everyone is on the same page.

Now, when it comes to industry news, you can share:

Interesting industry statistics
Competitor Information
Share what your customers are discussing on social media platforms
Share sales insights from bigger companies

Discuss Sales Organization Performance As A Whole

Sharing your organization’s performance through a report, helps everyone see collective progress.

If your company has multiple locations, you could even compare locational performance and create a healthy contest (More on this later.)

When sharing collective sales performance across timeframes, feedback is best given as a “compliment sandwich.”

What’s that, you ask?

A compliment sandwich is when you give feedback in the form of a compliment, constructive criticism, and a final compliment.

For most people (not all), this form of feedback helps them improve while still seeing where they did a good job!

Make It As Fun As Possible

Great sales meetings are not only valuable but also fun.

It’s an immersive experience rather than a dry, lecture type of environment (boooring!).

Does this mean EACH meeting is a parade? Not the case, but every meeting should inspire engagement!

Our next section will be different ways you can make your meetings more fun.

How Do You Make A Sales Meeting Fun?

Firstly, identify the importance of the meeting.

For instance, if you’re covering 4 different topics along with different sales exercises, then yes, the meeting should take place.

But if you’re just sharing company information alone, maybe an email is ideal.

Because if a meeting doesn’t have much value in it, people may tune out. And if meetings are consistently light in content, staff will drag their feet to them.

So to make sales meetings more fun, firstly have a filled agenda (3-4 topics, exercises, questions, company, and product news, etc.)

Next, be motivated and energize yourself, as it will reflect with your team.

How do you do this?

It’s all about attitude.

Attitude is how your thoughts and feelings show up in your behavior. So if you’re enthusiastic about the meeting, everyone will pick up on that.

Attitude also shows in your tonality. Just project your voice and vary your tone from time to time (keeps things interesting).

A good example of attitude and tonality during meetings is Grant Cardone.

When he speaks with his staff at Cardone Capital, he’s relaxed while enthusiastic and confident. This is a by-product of his positive attitude.

Next, recognizing good performance and big wins adds to a fun environment.

Maybe a staff member exceeded an individual revenue target by a considerable margin. Bringing that to the forefront brings good recognition and confidence within them that they can do it again.

Lastly, sales leaders that run fun meetings balance out meaningful discussions with light-hearted discussions.

This means bantering and bringing up non-work-related topics after discussing work-related ones.

Bonus: 8 Out-Of-The-Box Sales Meeting Ideas To Bring Fun

Have A Company Ritual That Kicks Meetings Off – This can be a company slogan that is said in unison or even everyone’s hands put together. It’s a fun way to kick off any meeting.

Do A Contest – Contests that run across multiple meetings create competition for your staff. You can award prizes for different things like having the most upsells for a particular product each month. This helps motivate your team to push further when obstacles come their way.

Create Gamification – Bringing some gamification is a good way to make meetings enjoyable. You can have your staff do timed quizzes with questions about your company and products. Maybe doing a contest on who can come up with the best elevator pitch.

Usually, the games you play are within just one meeting, while your contests can stretch for longer. However, it’s still great to have small prizes for single-meeting games.

Switch Up The Location – Perhaps most of your meetings occur in an office or over electronic communications like Zoom. You can add spice to your sessions by going to different restaurants or even another city. Changing locations also help make meetings more memorable and unique.

Kick Off Meetings With Music – Music is proven to boost mood, reduce stress. (Specially great for morning meetings (Specially great for morning meetings) Playing music before sales meetings definitely adds to the fun.

Team Building Exercises – These exercises help reps collaborate and work together. Often (based on how your sales organizational structure is set up), sales reps work individually so doing these exercises gives them a chance to be team players!

Team building exercises also give you a better idea of how your team members think and communicate.

Here are 4 excellent team-building exercises: “Blind drawing,” “What’s On Your Desk,” “3 Truths & A Lie”, “Scavenger Hunt.”

Start Or End with Something Motivational – Telling a story or giving a motivational speech can help energize your sales team to reach goals! Think of stories from your earlier experience in sales or a speech related to the habits of a successful salesperson.

Hold Mini Group Workshops – If you have multiple managers in the meeting, this is a great chance to break staff into groups and hold mini-sales workshops for a specific time interval. After the time is up, each group can share what they spoke about with everyone.

How Do You Run A Good Sales Meeting?

1. Start On Time

Start your meeting on time as consistently as possible. Think of asking meeting leaders to show up early to go over the agenda and objectives.

If it’s an in-person meeting, try having everyone join at least 10 minutes before it begins. If it’s a virtual meeting, have everyone join the call 5 minutes before it starts.

2. Apply Your Objective & Agenda

The meeting objective can be mentioned in your pre-meeting materials, and any calendar invites you send to your team.

Everyone should know the agenda and prepare accordingly. So, for example, if you mentioned that there would be a deal analysis presentation from each rep before the meeting, then each rep should be prepared to share what conclusions they made from their deals.

When you apply your agenda, things move at the right pace because you’re timing each activity and section of the meeting.

When you apply your objective, people leave the meeting gaining something new (a lesson, unique sales insights, new strategy, etc.)

3. Break The Ice

Even if everyone knows each other, meetings tend always to have an air of seriousness.

Breaking the ice helps everyone loosen up and eventually be more vocal.

Here are a couple of ways to break the ice in your meetings:

Favorite prospect and why
Random trivia questions
Favorite restaurant in town
Fill-in-The-Blank Questions

You’ll find that participation has a higher likelihood when you take a few minutes to break the ice!

(And as stated earlier, music helps elevate people’s mood and can act as an ice breaker before meetings.)

4. Offer Sales Value

Every meeting you conduct should bring significant value. Whether it’s critical lessons you explain or external sales experts you bring on to share their expertise.

It’s proven that people remember things better when they write things down, so have your team take notes. (Rather than relying on a post-meeting email or resources you’ve shared.)

As you analyze your pipeline deals, you can offer valuable insights on what a rep should do next to get a follow-up call or how they can nurture their lead.

Value is simply a by-product of applying your objective.

5. Active Participation & Do Immersive Activities

Great sales meetings are immersive and inspire participation. You can nail this by applying some of the 8 out-of-the-box sales meeting ideas outlined earlier.

BUT…

One of the most time-tested and impactful immersive activities is sales role-play.

This is when reps partner up and sell each other on your product or service (or even just a random object.)

Be sure to have them practice objection handling too, so they get familiar with the common objections.

Here are some other benefits to sales role play:

Teaches staff to sell under pressure
Keeps reps sharp by thinking faster
Makes reps better at relating to customers because reps can be more aware of how they come across

Encourage reps to make mistakes and learn in order to get better!

“If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. ” – John Wooden.

6. Takeaways, Forecasting & The Next Meeting

Good sales meetings wrap up with important takeaways and forecasts of what’s next for the company.

This can be forecasting how many leads are expected to enter the pipeline next month or quarterly projections. You also want to mention some things about your next meeting briefly.

When the meeting is over, reflect on what went well and what you can improve upon for the next one:

Did you stick with your agenda?
Did you reach your objective?
Did your objective make the meeting valuable?
Was your team immersed?

These are a few questions you can ask yourself and discuss with your meeting organizers.

Send meeting notes to all staff so they can have information electronically as well as in their notebooks.

CRM Sales Reporting For Your Sales Meetings

Sales meetings help your organization remain sharp and build lasting relationships between reps and managers.

Each meeting will be valuable when you make it an immersive experience while also making decisions based on your sales data.

VipeCloud’s Sales CRM is the right tool for practically any sales organization to see their reports, create important tasks and communicate efficiently!

All the CRM tools help you organize your deals, improve your selling, and even communicate better internally.

Got questions? Schedule a demo to see it in play!