Sales meetings should always include time for a personal growth or training activity.
This is Secret #9 in my 10 Secrets to a Successful Sales Meeting. (Check out secrets 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8).
Use the time together as an opportunity to help people improve their selling skills.
Sales training must be seen as a key activity of the team and it must be part of the team’s culture. Each time you assemble the team for a meeting, allocate time to a specific training activity.
It does not have to be complex or long. My suggestion is to keep it very tight and just deal with one specific item each meeting.
Keeping the activity or training focused on a very specific item allows for greater concentration by the team. Your objective is for each person to leave the meeting having learned something new and, more importantly, knowing how they are going to use it in their job. The item might be a new closing technique or a new approach to leaving a voicemail.
The activity doesn’t have to be complex. Key is people gain knowledge from something each time you meet.
As you make this a regular part of your sales meetings, your sales team will begin to realize the importance of on-going development, and they will begin to embrace not only the training you do during the meeting, but they also will begin looking for others way to improve their skills.
Vary how you do your training.
Use different approaches.
Some options include group discussion, small team review, role-play, worksheets or activities that get them up and moving around. The most effective training long-term is training that sticks and is applied, and this may also mean a subject will need to be repeated from time-to-time. Remember that repetition is how we learn best, and it takes quite a bit of repetition before anything becomes a habit.
One technique that can be very effective for training for small companies with a limited budget is to have the team read a book on sales, with the goal being to discuss for 10 minutes at each meeting one more chapter of the book. This can be a great way to get people to see the merits of using outside resources to improve their skills.
Copyright 2012, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.
