How to Run (Sales) Meetings That Don't Suck

Three areas to level up your meeting game.

Have you ever sat in a meeting and wondered, Why am I here? Thought, I’m not getting anything out of this, this is a waste of time. Or turned off your camera on a Zoom or Teams meeting so you could do “more productive work” while the meeting droned on?

That’s probably because you were in meeting that sucked.

Running meetings that don’t suck takes effort. If you’re leading the meeting, you’re responsible for making it not suck.

The only reason I know this is because I used to run lots of terrible meetings. I hated the questioning feeling I had when those meetings were over that nagged at me; did anyone find value in that meeting or did we just have a meeting to have a meeting?

Much of what’s included below can be applied to any meeting where information is passed or decisions are made, and I’ve applied them to both my leadership (read: manager) meetings as well as sales meetings.

There are a few things I did to level up my meeting game:

1. Created meeting rules (meaning, how we were going to operate together as a team)

2. Created a framework that each meeting followed (called IDEAA)

3. Got serious about my process (prep, facilitation, meeting timing, follow-up)

Here’s an example of our Meeting Guidelines we created to set expectations for all of our leadership meetings. (We called them GSD meetings — “Get Stuff Done”). This can be adjusted for both operational and sales meetings.

Meeting Guidelines

1. Set the agenda in advance

   • Send requests to Joe (aka Meeting Holder); cc admin /note taker.

   • Requests for agenda items are due within 72 hours before the meeting.

   • Commitment is to have the final agenda in the meeting calendar request (or Slack or Teams channel) within 48 hours before the meeting.

2. Come prepared

3. Be on time

4. Everyone’s voice counts

5. Announce in advance if anyone needs to step out early

6. Assign a dedicated note taker and time keeper (separate people)

7. Be Present: Please do not look at your phone or place it on the table at the meeting

   • Dedicated breaks will be provided to check your phone and email

8. Set aside 10 minutes at the end of every meeting for resolutions. What did we decide? Who needs to know?

Attached is the full meeting guidelines PDF

Meeting Framework

The IDEAA framework came from trying to make my sales meetings valuable to my reps.

I had a lot of territory-based reps that were spending time getting together face-to-face twice a month, and I wanted to make sure we were covering what we needed and making it valuable for each rep.

In each meeting, I wanted to make sure we covered at least three of the five areas. I found that trying to do all five in every meeting got stale and seemed repetitive, but doing three or four of the five allows some variety from meeting to meeting, which I found valuable.

IDEAA Framework (I’ll go into more detail with examples in a future post):

• Information

• Decisions

• Education

• Acknowledgment

• Accountability

Meeting Process

Lastly, getting serious about the process to make good meetings happen was really important. And when I took inventory of my mediocre meetings, I realized that I was failing in two of the four areas below.

I wasn’t spending enough effort preparing for our meetings, and I wasn’t keeping on track with the meeting time (meaning, starting and ending on time as well as devoting time for each section).

Here’s an outline of the components of the process to run meetings that don’t suck. We got serious about it so that anyone who leads a meeting uses this process.

1. Preparation

2. Facilitation

3. Meeting Time

4. Follow Up