Sales Intelligence: Meetings: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

[Doha]

Wasting time on meetings is so prevalent there is an app for it.

In the sales world, about 80 percent of a sales person time is spent in meetings, preparing for meetings and completing administrative tasks as opposed to making sales.

Most meetings waste time. They aren?t necessary, and the people in them aren?t paying attention.

And for CEOs, the meetings can seem endless.

So, what do you do? How do you make sure your sales reps have all the information they need to do their job without having them sit in a conference room three days a week?

The answer isn?t simply to stop having meetings. Meetings are a necessity, especially given the changing nature of sales. But to start, you can plan better for the meetings, or maybe limit them to one day a week, specifically Tuesday afternoon.

For starters, one way to get started on the right track is to stop emailing about meetings.
Cut back on emails about meetings


About half of a worker?s time is spent writing emails, which involves a lot of back-and-forth messaging trying to schedule a meeting. The dance gets tiring fast. One person doesn?t read all the emails in the chain, causing another person to bring up that, no, you can?t meet Monday afternoon, because another person will be out on a sale, which means someone else thinks you?re meeting Monday afternoon, just due to the mere mention of the day.

Then, you start a new email chain to try again, but the same oversights occur. Next thing you know, half of the group is attending a meeting that never existed while the other half is out on lunch or on a sales call.

(Even if you?ve developed a new way of communicating better with each other, email can derail that, too.)

What you could have done is set up the office with a cloud operating system to better integrate communicating and personal calendars, if your company is interested in the apps which are gaining in popularity. Or, you could simply use a shared calendar to plan a meeting.

If a high-level manager needs to plan a meeting, he or she could access the calendar, which would display all the available times for his or her employees, and plan the meeting then. Then, the never-ending email chain to try and plan a meeting dies forever.

You can also avoid traps of a bad meeting listed here.
Wasting time on meetings is so prevalent there is an app for it.

In the sales world, about 80 percent of a sales person time is spent in meetings, preparing for meetings and completing administrative tasks as opposed to making sales.

Most meetings waste time. They aren?t necessary, and the people in them aren?t paying attention.

And for CEOs, the meetings can seem endless.

So, what do you do? How do you make sure your sales reps have all the information they need to do their job without having them sit in a conference room three days a week?

The answer isn?t simply to stop having meetings. Meetings are a necessity, especially given the changing nature of sales. But to start, you can plan better for the meetings, or maybe limit them to one day a week, specifically Tuesday afternoon.

For starters, one way to get started on the right track is to stop emailing about meetings.
Cut back on emails about meetings


About half of a worker?s time is spent writing emails, which involves a lot of back-and-forth messaging trying to schedule a meeting. The dance gets tiring fast. One person doesn?t read all the emails in the chain, causing another person to bring up that, no, you can?t meet Monday afternoon, because another person will be out on a sale, which means someone else thinks you?re meeting Monday afternoon, just due to the mere mention of the day.

Then, you start a new email chain to try again, but the same oversights occur. Next thing you know, half of the group is attending a meeting that never existed while the other half is out on lunch or on a sales call.

(Even if you?ve developed a new way of communicating better with each other, email can derail that, too.)

What you could have done is set up the office with a cloud operating system to better integrate communicating and personal calendars, if your company is interested in the apps which are gaining in popularity. Or, you could simply use a shared calendar to plan a meeting.

If a high-level manager needs to plan a meeting, he or she could access the calendar, which would display all the available times for his or her employees, and plan the meeting then. Then, the never-ending email chain to try and plan a meeting dies forever.

You can also avoid traps of a bad meeting listed here.
Signs of a bad meeting

    If you know within minutes of the start of the meeting that you and your colleagues aren?t prepared for it, then all hope is lost. Often, you?ll know you?re not prepared because you weren?t given an agenda 48 hours before. Agendas are essential to a productive meeting.

A meeting shouldn?t be an open-ended discussion on the topics de jour. Employees should enter it knowing what they will be discussing. If they are empowered by an agenda, then they are more likely to come to the meeting more open to discussion. You want to encourage open discussion.


Employees should also be prepared themselves. For example, if a meeting is about social CRM apps, then the employee should have spent some time familiarizing themselves with the trend. Afterall, meeting holders have a limited time before participants start zoning out.


An example of a company that does meetings right is Intel. For each conference meeting room, the company posts a poster that reads, ?Do you know the purpose of this meeting? Do you have an agenda? Do you know your role? Do you follow the rules for good minutes??


Intel leaves no room for their employees to not know what to expect for meetings.

    You also know you?re in a bad meeting when goals are set, but there is no clear path set to achieve those goals. Say your company wants to increase sales productivity by 3 percent in the next quarter. The goal is admirable, but moot unless direct strategies are outlined for the sales reps to follow to reach their goals.


Sales reps should also enter the meeting understanding what goals need to be reached, or essentially, the point of the meeting. Instead of wasting five minutes setting up the point of the meeting, send out an agenda beforehand listing the agenda and strategies that will be discussed.


Time is money. Don?t spend more than 90 minutes in a meeting.

    If you ever catch yourself thinking in a meeting, ?you could of told me this in an email,? you?re in a bad meeting. Never call a meeting to update a sales staff on where they are with a quarter?s sales goals, for example. Call a meeting if you?ve developed a new way to overhaul your approach to those goals. In essence, avoid meetings that involve information only flowing one way.

Other quick meeting tips

    Only invite people to the meeting who need to be at the meeting.
    Keep minutes and share them with the people who need them.
    Make sure people attend the meeting on time. Again, time is money.