It is the sales leader’s responsibility to guide the team on how to market a product to specific client segments by identifying challenges, offering tips and updates, and helping them to improve their sales pitches and interactions.

Regular internal sales meetings help maintain a productive and positive sales culture. They reinforce that sales executives are a team and share a common purpose – to close more deals.

The preparation for a sales meeting begins with agenda development and includes a list of topics for discussion. A sales meeting agenda focuses on the activities that will drive the sales results. It is for internal use only – a personal outline that will help reps stay on track and organized when presenting in front of clients.

Your sales meeting agenda should be both firm and flexible – allowing you to remain on track while also moving with the conversation’s flow.

A sales meeting agenda is vital for successful customer conversations

Doodle’s State of Meetings Report 2019 reviewed the meetings scheduled through its platform during 2018, and interviewed more than 6,500 executives, revealing some interesting meeting stats:

• 72% mentioned that setting clear objectives is important for successful meetings;

• 67% admitted that having a clear agenda is important for having a good, productive meeting;

• 26% stated poorly organized meetings negatively affect their client relationships.

Another study from the Wall Street Journal revealed that employees spent more time in meetings, with the average time spent increasing by 8- 10% every year since 2000.

Every minute the sales reps spend during the meeting is precious, and a sales meeting should not be like a boring group therapy session, otherwise sales reps are only wasting their time and energy. Instead, a sales meeting should prepare them for a perfect pitch presentation that impresses clients.

Best practices to create an effective sales meeting agenda

To make your meetings effective and productive, let’s walk through how to plan a weekly sales meeting agenda.

Identify the purpose

The purpose of the meeting defines its direction, the themes to be addressed, and helps prevent overflows and irrelevant content. This activity will likely save the time of attendees in terms of a clear set of sales meeting ideas, time frames, and objectives.

Internal sales meetings can serve different purposes – share or retrieve information, validate and accept a discussion, discuss issues and find solutions, discuss new products/services, or promote communication and improve cohesion within the same team.

Since the whole team/department is coming together, a well-defined purpose will help avoid tardiness, poor attendance, and distractions.

Plan the sales meeting agenda carefully

Sales executives are often juggling many opportunities and priorities, and have a short attention span. Depending on the nature of their dealings, they have multiple sales meeting agenda topics to brief themselves on.

Spending the time to prepare an agenda will help executives remain focused, and include only the relevant discussion items and a key takeaway for each meeting.

Even the preparation of a singular agenda takes effort and time, but really pays off, helping to avoid common meeting issues and enhance efficiency and communication between participants.

Create the sales meeting agenda

When it’s time to create a sales meeting agenda, you shouldn’t waste time creating it from scratch. There are many sales meeting agenda templates or internal sample sales meeting agenda docs that you can customize, but save your time and use a meeting management tool to organize and manage your agenda and share it quickly with your peers.

Tip: Notiv is an intelligent meeting assistant, and you can connect it to your Zoom, Google Meet or Webex account. Notiv will show all your upcoming meetings and let you add agendas and track decisions, follow-up tasks, and action items. You can share your agenda and notes with your team, clients, or anyone else, and invite them to collaborate.

List the agenda items and set the time

Define how many discussion items you will have on the agenda and set a time for each according to its importance. For instance, some agenda items are interlinked, while some are debatable and require additional time. You can move open-ended topics that require discussion to the end, and keep important items at the start of the meeting.

A weekly sales meeting agenda may include many discussion items like pipeline updates, success stories, insights, obstacles, client feedback, competitor updates, with some time reserved for the sales reps to present their sales pitches.

Tip: It’s a good idea to use Notiv to rehearse your sales pitch during the meeting and share the transcript with everyone for their feedback.

Your team will analyze it, and share examples and ideas to make it better. This way, you can prepare well and present the pitch perfectly to your clients.

Structure and share the sales meeting agenda

Agenda structuring will help achieve the purpose of the meeting, answering questions such as “What needs and pain points am I going to solve for my clients.” Your previous interactions with the client or market research will give you an idea of how your company’s products and services are going to resolve a customer issue, or help in expanding their expertise/achieving a competitive advantage. The reasons could be many, so it is important to identify the right ones.

Some agendas simply list topics as short sentences, such as “continuing our sales planning.” You can clarify the purpose of every item by phrasing the talking points as open-ended questions. Instead of discussing “miscellaneous updates”, how about “what important details do I have to share with the team this week?’ Think strategically about the agenda and ultimate outcome you want to achieve.

Tip: Use Notiv to share meeting points and invite team members to provide updates regarding what’s working and what’s not. You can add your team members by giving them permission to add/edit notes and collaborate without back and forth emails. This way, everyone can share their quotas and KPIs in the meeting agenda, which will be discussed in detail during the meeting. Besides, your team can bring up important questions or ideas that were omitted from the agenda.

Assign responsibilities against every action item

If there are many speakers, clarify every discussion item and who is responsible for each one. Sales representatives are responsible for following up with their prospects and clients, and they will share any updates during the meeting.

The sales meeting is not organized to pressurize the sales reps to achieve targets but to address issues at hand, share experiences, and motivate each other. At the end of the day, you want focused and energetic sales people to bring in more customers. You should assign a space in your weekly sales meeting agenda to have a sincere discussion.

Tip: Clarify which updates you want to discuss during the meeting. If you use messaging platforms such as Slack for internal communication, you can integrate Notiv with it to automatically post all notes and action items on the designated Slack channel.

Make your meetings smarter

To save time on searching and booking meeting rooms, and configuring and plugging various tools, it’s a good idea to organize a remote meeting. Web conferences are a great alternative to in-office meetings, and they are the only option when the sales team is scattered across the country or different regions.

Taking these considerations into account during meetings will help your sales team focus on what matters. The sales executives’ time is money; the sales meeting agenda must ensure the discussion remains on track, and there is adequate time to discuss relevant issues.

You have already discovered how to create a great sales meeting agenda and prepared yourself for how to talk about your company and product. As you are getting ready for your pitch, why not take the help of an intelligent tool- Notiv to have a written record of your sales calls so you can just focus on the conversation. It captures and transcribes all the important moments, so you can focus on the conversation.

Notiv also allows you to add an agenda, record and transcribe the meeting discussion, create action items, and mark important points during the meeting. You can also share the meeting recordings and the scripts with the attendees, through different applications such as Slack, for collaboration and follow-up.

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