How to Build a Sales Meeting Agenda That Energizes Your Team

​For many in the corporate world, meetings have the reputation of being time-wasting, soul-crushing exercises in futility. However, when sales meetings are designed and presented correctly, few activities contribute more to collective creativity, collaboration, and organizational growth.

To be sure, it's important to find a balance between leaving space for the expression of ideas and providing clear guidance on the scope and purpose of the meeting. The key here is structure. Create a clear agenda that has buy-in from all key stakeholders. As a result, you'll be able to develop useful and efficient sales meetings. 

Here are some critical steps to take along this line:

Step #1: Set Intentions. Create Connections.

Setting intentions is exactly what it sounds like. Before each sales meeting, you need to make it clear to all participants what you hope to achieve through the meeting.

Creating connections, however, is especially vital if you're beginning to bring your sales and marketing teams together via integrated meetings. It may be a good idea to use the first combined meeting with both departments as a sort of "brainstorming session."

Open the meeting by having each participant share something about themselves. This could be a professional or personal win, someone they want to recognize or thank, or an icebreaker exercise that gets people excited and engaged in the meeting. This shouldn't take up too much time. However, it is an essential tool in making each person feel heard and valued. Then, proceed to get a consensus on what the partnership between sales and marketing should look like. Get your team members to share enough ideas that everyone starts to get excited about what the future could look like.

Set the stage with this first meeting. Then, future integrated meetings can focus on ideas, initiatives, and actions through the lens of that original vision outlined by your team.

Step #2: Remember Why You Are Meeting

Hopefully, you've already made the point of the meeting clear long before it actually begins. But it never hurts to introduce a meeting by clearly stating the goals. This can be especially helpful if team members are used to participating in a certain type of meeting, but not necessarily the type you're currently holding. Whether it's sharing knowledge, creating accountability, or attacking a specific problem, make sure everyone knows what the objective is, and how you want them to participate.

Step #3: Evaluate Where You Are Right Now

There are, without fail, two key pieces of information you need for any successful journey: your desired destination and where you are now. We already alluded to the desired destination in step #1(and we'll discuss it more in step #4)... but what about your team's current state? How are sales and marketing collaborating? Is there still room for improvement? Which sales and marketing tactics are proving effective? And which ones aren't performing up to expectations? Where are the bottlenecks in the sales pipeline?

You'll likely need to use a mixture of qualitative and quantitative information to arrive at an accurate analysis of your current situation. Again, this is why it's crucial to properly prepare any team members who will be attending. Enable them to show up with the data and anecdotal information to make the best use of everyone's time.

Step #4: Align on Where You Want to Go

Many corporate employees are used to weekly, rinse-repeat meetings where they can mostly tune out. But when every meeting is geared toward a particular outcome, things change quickly. 

At some point during the meeting, you need to explicitly name the problem, challenge, or initiative you have come together to solve. This should only be done after everyone has had a chance to provide their input — after all, your view of what the issue is may change during the course of a truly productive, collaborative meeting. Nevertheless, once the issue has been clearly defined, it allows everyone on the team to focus on solutions — both collectively and individually.

It's important to note here that this doesn't just have to involve overarching business outcomes. It may be appropriate in some meetings to focus on more granular results. These include reducing the number of unqualified sales leads, clarifying marketing communication to increase customer satisfaction, and so forth.

Step #5: Chart the Path Forward

Once the team has been aligned on a desired outcome or destination, it's time to specify which solutions should be focused on, and come up with tactics to support those solutions. This may involve a standalone meeting — e.g., a strategy or working session. As the names suggest, strategy sessions are more focused on conceptual troubleshooting. Conversely, working sessions involve the nitty-gritty details that transform a strategy into an active business process.

Step #6: Plan Next Steps and Create Accountability

Every meeting should have clear next steps — including owners of those steps, requirements, and deadlines (or at least approximate timelines). Make sure all participants agree. Everyone should leave the meeting understanding what's expected of them. Don't leave anything vague! If you even get the slightest sense that an aspect of your plan might still be somewhat nebulous, or that a team member doesn't quite understand what they need to do, clarify, clarify, clarify until it can't get any clearer.

Don't confuse insistence on clarity with micro-management. The latter is counterproductive and discouraging; the former is essential for the smooth operation of any business and leads to increased discipline and accountability among your team members.

Step #7: Always Support Commitment With a Recap

No one should ever leave a meeting, no matter how positive, thinking: "That's nice, but I doubt anything will come from it." It's important to remind your participants that it's everyone's responsibility to support the team and do what they have agreed to do. 

One of the most effective, yet simplest ways to do this is by providing each meeting participant with a recap after the meeting ends. This is often provided via email in the form of a brief summary along with a list of action items, and each item's owner. In-person recaps can also be effective. Supporting the team through solid recaps builds trust, collaboration, accountability, and good habits. (You may even find these good habits sneak into other meetings as well!)

If you keep these seven key steps in mind as you design your meeting agendas, you'll undoubtedly find that your sessions become more productive, your teams become tighter and more focused, and your overall sales process becomes smoother and more efficient. Remember, you don't want your meetings to crush souls — instead, they should help your team crush their sales goals!

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​A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources.