Ditch the Agenda Dread: Unleash Your Sales Team's Voice & Crush Your Meetings
Turn your team's wants and challenges into powerful, engaging sales meetings with six simple questions.
Have you ever started to work on your sales meeting agenda and thought, "Shoot - I'm not sure what we should include?"
Either you're looking at a blank page wondering how to fill it, or you have so many things to cram into the agenda you're wondering how you're going to cover all of this effectively.
I've found myself in both situations.
One of my solutions is to use the IDEAA framework to create meeting agendas (I use this for all of my meetings, not just sales), which I go more in-depth on in this post.
Another thing I started doing that really helped was to ask my sales team what they wanted to learn, level up, or cover in meetings.
I asked these six questions:
What are topics you'd like to learn about in the next 6 months?
What are the 2-3 most challenging things in your job right now?
What does support look like for you over the next 6 months?
What is one book you've read over the past year that has had a significant impact on you or your business?
Is there anything you feel the team can do to improve our performance as a team overall?
Anything else you want to share?
Questions 1-3 really hit on what the rep needs from three angles - what they want to learn, what is challenging them, and what support looks like. You can find out a lot with these three questions alone.
For Question 4, I always like to hear about books reps are reading, both personally and to get ideas on resources we might be able to dig into as a team. One book that came out of this question was "Fanatical Prospecting" by Jeb Blount - which has become a favorite of mine and I recommend all the time for new reps. (I liked it so much I did a book summary of it in this newsletter).
Question 5 is designed to gauge how we are functioning as a team from the reps' perspective. You get much different answers from this question and I'm repeatedly surprised by my own blind spots. I often think I know what's going on with the team until someone tells me otherwise…
Question 6 is a way to give individual reps the ability to share whatever else is on their mind.
To make this easy, I put this into Microsoft Forms (you can use Google Forms or even print out a copy and have them handwrite their answers) so the answers automatically populate into a spreadsheet.
The key is to keep these answers in the same place you keep your sales meeting agendas and calendar out every six months when you'll send this out so you don't forget.
The system is the way…
Reach out if you have any questions.
-Joe