No one wants to have any more meetings than is necessary, and especially meetings that don’t have a solid agenda and real and beneficial outcome. Scheduling regular meetings—and keeping them—helps you to produce greater results through your sales team.

Create Accountability

With the easy access to reporting and information about sales activity and progress within the pipeline, the requirement that the salesperson report their sales activities and outcomes has been all but eliminated. While they do have to keep their sales force automation up to date, they don’t have to compile the data themselves and they don’t have to report it to their sales managers each week. The sales manager simply pulls the data each week.

This eliminates accountability. Something more is needed.

Holding regularly scheduled review meetings creates an irreplaceable culture of accountability. It creates the critical interaction of discussing the salesperson’s activity results and their progress. It also gives the salesperson an opportunity to ask for help and assistance where they need it.

These meetings can alert both you and your salespeople when they are off course and allow you to make adjustments before goals are missed and before problems occur.

Create Awareness

The demands on a sales manager’s time have never been greater. Holding regularly scheduled meetings helps to create an awareness of what your salespeople are encountering in the field when you are not with them.

Regular meetings can help you to see the patterns, the challenges the salespeople face in the market, the new opportunities that are springing up, and an increased awareness of what might need to be changed to help produce greater results. In addition to reporting their numbers, asking your salespeople a simple question like, “So what’s going on,” can help surface issues and ideas that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Collecting feedback from the field provides you with an increased awareness of what’s going on in your space.

Sell Your Priorities

As a sales leaders, getting results through others means selling your priorities and making sure that your whole team is aligned and working towards them. It isn’t enough to set these priorities at the beginning of the year. Either you sell your priorities hard until you cross the finish line or you end the year short of those goals.

Creating a meeting rhythm gives you the opportunity to reiterate, restate, and refocus your sales team on your priorities. A great sales manager never says anything once, and your team’s commitment to your goals will only equal yours if you are committed to continually selling your priorities.

Schedule regular meetings with a rhythm that allows you to be effective in helping your sales force produce results and you to reach your goals.

Questions

Do you keep regularly scheduled meetings with your sales force each week?

Do you review their activity and their progress each week?

Is yours a culture of accountability?

Do your meetings allow you an opportunity to capture what’s going on in your market? The challenges your sales force is facing?

Do you reiterate your priorities and your team’s goals each week and give them new guidance?

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4729.

Related posts:

1. Who Do You Serve? A Note to the Sales Manager There aren’t too many jobs more difficult than the first line sales manager. The pressure to produce results is real, and the time to produce...
2. It Feels Like Work, But It’s Not There are countless distractions that prevent you from doing the work that you should be doing to produce the results that you should be producing....
3. It’s Not Enough to Manage. Notch Them Up! (A Note to the Sales Manager) Your success as a sales leader and a sales manager depends upon your ability to achieve results through your salespeople. The more effective your sales...
4. The Real Method to Improve Performance Evaluations and Results (A Note to the Sales Manager) You can’t fix the score by focusing on the scoreboard itself. To improve the score, you have to focus instead on executing the plays that put points...
5. Accountability and Leading Indicators (A Note to the Sales Manager) In management, we prefer to evaluate performance based on factual, concrete results. Everything that can be captured and reported is, and the data provides an...