We’ve likely all sat through weekly sales meetings where we struggle with accountability, finding new topics to discuss, and keeping things exciting and engaging. Sometimes these meetings start to feel redundant and unproductive.
We’re here to help you run more productive and efficient sales meetings that help people win more opportunities, score more contracts, and hit your revenue objectives while helping everyone make more money. Followup CRM’s COO, Erick Vargas, has compiled all his learnings and best practices from the hundreds of roofing sales meetings he’s attended. Here are some of the best takeaways that translate those weekly sales motions into actual revenue producing results:
- Align Your Sales Goals
If you aren’t discussing goals and progress at these meetings, it becomes tough to forecast revenue as well as the company’s future. We have a $50,000,000 commercial roofing client who had one sales guy on the team bringing in $30,000,000 worth of business until he left and started his own company. The issue is, when you have a salesperson on your team who carries most of the weight on their shoulders and they decide to leave, those clients, bids, opportunities, and overall relationships start to fall through the cracks if you don’t properly manage these contacts and processes in your CRM.
When this $30,000,000 salesperson left, that company made sure they were able to accurately forecast their pipeline by making sure every email, note, and contact was being tracked in Followup CRM. Two months after losing their $30,000,000 employee, the company exceeded their revenue goal because they were properly managing their pipeline in our CRM and openly discussing these items at their sales meetings.
If you neglect to cover your sales goals at these weekly sales meetings, your staff will be left in the dark, and you won't have the data you need to forecast for revenue and allocate your budget accordingly.
- Hold Your Team Accountable
Another major issue we’ve noticed in many roofing sales meetings is lack of accountability. If you ask a salesperson if they’re going to win a deal, they will usually tell you yes, but we all know that things come up and the deal doesn’t always happen. If you’re using Followup CRM to track your sales progress, revenue goals, and quota, you’ll be able to see an accurate closing ratio per salesperson, have a timeline idea of when jobs might close, and know how much revenue is in the pipeline.
Utilize these reporting tools and openly discuss these during your sales meetings so you know which salespeople are behind on their quotas. Accountability can’t happen if you aren’t openly discussing goals and sales progress.
One way to hold your team accountable is to have your salespeople individually give a short presentation during these meetings where they review their pipeline, contracts, leads, and referrals. This could be a quick 2-minute presentation where they run through their numbers.
The reason this works so well is because no one wants to be on the bottom of the list. This will motivate your team to stay on top of their work and will also allow leaders to provide guidance and direction when salespeople aren’t hitting their goals and objectives.
- Plan Ahead
Oftentimes, companies hold weekly sales meetings at the same day and time each week but fail to design the meeting with a structured agenda. When there's no structure and assigned leader to host these meetings, it can get chaotic and veer off topic, making it a waste of time. There are a few major components to cover in these meetings, and we’ve provided a graphic below to help you stay organized and on track:
The first three columns at the top include marketing, sales/estimating and account management. Breaking things up this way allows you to compartmentalize and understand what's going on in each section of the business. Typically, what we see at a company is the following: a lead comes in, you qualify the lead, you close the contract, and then you build a relationship. The graphic above displays this sales process, defines the roles of the individuals contributing to each specific stage of the buyer’s journey and breaks down the items those individuals are responsible for.
A great way to structure your sales meeting is to go down the list of each of these categories and receive an update from each stage of the buyer’s journey so that everyone is on the same page. This structure allows for a collaborative meeting that helps with productivity, engagement, and allows everyone to stay in the loop and leave with actionable items to help reach the company’s goals. Use this time to optimize each category in your business and help others out where it’s needed.
- Specialize and Optimize
Trying to juggle multiple tasks and wear several hats can really hurt the lead to customer experience. Try sticking to one specialized area and optimize those specific activities. This allows for a more structured process, is more professional, and will help you build those long-term relationships with your clients, which, in turn, will lead to more business.
Apply this to your sales meetings so that when you’re giving updates, you can uncover any gaps and find ways to help each other out to better achieve company goals.
- Quota Management
Quota management is an extremely important component when running a business. Be sure to set weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual quotas for bidding and contracts. If you don't set a plan, you're doing a disservice to your sales and estimating team because they don't have a path to follow. If you have a path set in place, your salespeople will have guidance, and you’ll have data to measure them against.
Not having quotes in place makes it hard to hold people accountable. Address this data during your sales meetings so you know where everyone stands and your team can stay on the same page.
- Weekly Rhythm
It’s important to be consistent when holding these sales meetings. Pick a date and time and stick with it. For example, let’s say you designate Monday mornings at 8:00 AM for your weekly sales meeting. This will prompt your staff to prepare everything they need prior to that weekly sales meeting and help build the accountability mentioned earlier.
Some companies only hold sales meetings once a month, but a best practice is to host one once a week. Waiting 3-4 weeks to hold a meeting can be damaging to the sales process if your staff isn’t on top of their pipeline.
A Free Template For Your Sales Meetings
We’ve put together a Free Template to help keep your sales meetings organized and structured. You can access the template by clicking here. Happy selling!
