Sales meetings may not deliver the same thrill that comes from closing a deal, but that doesn’t mean they should be boring.
Engaging meetings should keep sales teams aligned, informed and motivated. To achieve these outcomes with his team at LeanIX, Sales Director Mark Hemphill said he centers meetings around a continuous cycle of ideation, testing and feedback. In their weekly meetings, the sales team provides feedback on how strategies from the last week went. Then they brainstorm how to improve and test out new ideas over the following week.
Rinse, and repeat.
If these meetings sound repetitive, that’s because they are. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t engaging. The key to keeping salespeople on their toes? Agency, Hemphill said. Ownership prompts salespeople to be interactive and creative, and better prepared to sell the company’s enterprise IT architecture software. Hemphill — who has almost a decade of sales leadership experience under his belt — shared how he keeps his team meetings productive and even fun.
How often do you hold sales meetings with your team and what are the key objectives of those meetings?
The team does role plays each morning to listen and learn from each other. And we have a weekly meeting to share learnings, updates and feedback on what’s working or not working. This meeting encourages a group think-tank session that leads to improvements as outcomes.
The team does role plays each morning to listen and learn from each other.”
What are some actions you take before or during those meetings to ensure they’re productive, useful and engaging?
I have a list of to-dos I prepared over the past week based on feedback or updates I’d like to share with the team. Sparking a conversation with the team brings out great ideas and I think it’s important to ask for feedback once we actually implement those ideas. I like to ask each team member about key takeaways, which ensures talk tracks are absorbed and we can act on the knowledge we learned.
What role do your salespeople play in shaping the conversations in those meetings?
We like to decide as a team what makes the most sense. Sometimes there are differences in opinion, which we value. So we’ll A/B test different scenarios and collect feedback on how each one worked. One of our core values is “continuous improvement” so we pride ourselves on encouraging new ways of doing things. This practice ensures we’re always iterating and striving for perfection in what we do.
