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Summary: Traditional sales meetings are not particularly effective. There are better ways to achieve your goals of informing and creating relationships within your sales team.

There are two types of sales professionals, those that hate going to sales meetings and those that are liars. Sales meetings are usually and consistently awful . They go from profoundly boring to incredibly cornball. I’ve been to hundreds of them in their traditional form and they seem to be a bad habit that the sales community can’t stop. The biggest benefit of a traditional sales meeting is that the salesperson gets to build a relationship with and exchange ideas with other salespersons. Ironically, that benefit is an unplanned byproduct.

If we were to do away with sales meetings, what would we put in their place? Before you answer that question you have to ask yourself what your goals are for your sales meetings. If you’re like most people your goals are to communicate new information to the salesforce and promote camaraderie. The typical sales meeting doesn’t do either very well. The training that is conducted is normally of the classroom variety that goes on for hours. Salespeople aren’t built for this kind of learning and as a result it doesn’t work very well.

Not only do traditional sales meetings not provide a good venue for training but they don’t create the optimum atmosphere to create relationships either. The salesperson’s time is tied up in boring classroom training, role playing, vendor presentations and the long winded presentation from the company’s CEO. There is a better way to achieve the goals of providing information to the salesforce while helping them build networks with each other.

There are lots of ways to learn. Only one of the ways requires that everyone be sitting together in chairs in one big room for hours on end. Why not train the sale force in little pieces throughout the year using various types of 5–15 minute training techniques such as podcasts, short training videos, e-learning, web conferencing, etc.? Gen X’ers and those born after them prefer to be trained in little pieces on a continuing basis versus getting it all dumped on them at once. An additional benefit is that this is also a much more effective way to disseminate information.

Since you’ve removed the training from the sales meeting you are free to focus on relationship building. A sales meeting without training sounds like a party to me and this is exactly what your salespeople want! Plan an event where they can really relax and enjoy one another. Ideas for this include a golf outing, weekend getaway, day at the lake, etc. The rule is that no official shop-talk is planned. The relationship building part will take off and your salespeople will appreciate that the company did this for them. It’s a win-win.

Sales management has gotten in the habit of cloning the traditional sales meeting year after year. Part of the reason for this is that it’s what has always been done; part of the reason is laziness. Dump the stale idea of traditional sales meetings. Split the training and network building into two pieces. Try something more fun, effective and more appreciated by your salespeople.

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Tags: meetings

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