6 Reasons Why Your Sales Meetings Fail

If you think that sales meetings are a necessary evil, we’re here to change your mind. There is no need to suffer through another unproductive sales meeting that leaves you feeling defeated.

In order to help you, we’ve consulted an expert and created an actionable guide that will help you conduct better meetings. Our guide can be applicable no matter the type of products or solutions you sell. 

The importance of sales meetings

Simply put, the importance of sales meetings lies in increasing your sales. 

This is the time when your team should come together and work on:

• Bettering your sales process
• Making changes based on customer feedback
• Creating new strategies
• Analyzing your previous efforts and so much more

If your team constantly leaves your meetings with more questions than answers or feels unmotivated, you need to change your approach. 

In order for your sales meeting to be successful, you should always come prepared and have a specific itinerary. 

We’ve prepared an actionable guide you could follow to better organize your meetings and achieve your long-term sales goals. 

Reasons your sales meetings fail

Managing a sales team isn’t easy. That’s why it takes a lot of skills and experience to become a sales leader. They need to be proactive, know how to build a great team and be able to motivate their workers.

With all those roles and responsibilities, organizing a successful sales meeting might slip through the cracks. Lucky for you, we picked our Account Executive’s brain in order to bring you a guide for sales meetings based on an expert's opinion. 

To start off, this is James’ take on why most sales meetings fail. 

I feel that the purpose of a team sales meeting is to inspire. Often, I find that a story or anecdote about a past successful scenario is helpful to set the scene. Mindset and attitude are the most significant drivers of success in a salesperson. 

Most everything else is a process (which is also very important), but after a team gathering, I want my folks to be motivated, confident and ready to take action. A failed meeting is one that leaves reps feeling unsure, inert or confused.

You need to ensure that your team is motivated and productive. If they’re not, your entire sales process will suffer. 

All of your employees are different and they will respond to different incentives. It’s up to you to get to know them and understand what motivates them. Once you cover that, here are the 6 other reasons your sales meetings are failing. 

You don’t have a standardized sales process

In order to have a successful sales meeting, your team firstly needs to know what their roles and responsibilities are. 

That means that you need to have a standardized sales process and that your sales team needs to work as one. 

Companies that defined a formal sales process experience 18% more revenue growth compared to companies that don’t. With that being said, it’s easy to see why you would want to invest time and effort in restructuring your sales process. 

Once you set up a company-wide standardized process you can expect: 

• Your sales team to be more efficient
• Higher revenue
• To have an easier onboarding process
• The sales team to have an easier way to analyze their sales efforts
• Better customer support

Before you can start creating a standardized sales process, you’ll need to have a great understanding of your audience and the solution you’re selling. If you don’t have a good base, you won’t be able to create an applicable sales strategy. 

Once you know who’s buying from you and how they’re using your products and services, you can go ahead and create a plan on how you’ll sell your solution. 

Start by setting up your sales cycle. It usually goes like this: 

• Generating leads
• Qualifying them
• Presenting your offer
• Closing your sale
• Conducting the follow-up process

After you set up your sales cycle, it’s time to start testing it out. Test out which pieces of content work best, which lead-generation tactics work and more. 

Throughout the whole process, make sure to include your sales team. Let them pitch ideas, explain the need for a standardized process and more. 

Once you have a clear layout, you’ll be able to shape your strategy according to new goals and customer feedback. 

Key takeaways

You need to set up a company-wide standardized sales process in order to be able to track your efforts. 

You’re focusing on the wrong metrics

Sales metrics are like pizza toppings, if you want them all, you’ll end up with a hot mess. 

Focusing on every single sales metric will leave you in an undesired position. This is because you’ll end up wasting time trying to better specific metrics that don’t result in new customers, more revenue or a better customer experience. 

Here are the wise words of James, our Account Executive. 

Sales metrics are for 1-2-1 sessions. There's value in reminding the team of the overall purpose and vision for the company but the detail of how to achieve quota with specific measurable tactics has its place in coaching sessions. 

The team meeting is a place for thought leadership, confidence building and sharing of best practice tips, tools, and techniques.

Key takeaways 

Focusing on too many metrics will leave your team confused. Make sure your sales meetings are focused on building the confidence of your team. A detailed look into sales metrics should be left to individual meetings. 

You’re not planning your meetings properly

If you’re coming into your meetings without a plan, thinking that your team will take the lead, you won’t have productive meetings. 

It’s essential that you plan out your meetings because that way they’ll be shorter and you’ll get more out of them. 

Start with some positive news. Compliment your team on the things that they’ve done and make sure you give credit where it’s due. Once you’re done with that, transition into analyzing your sales cycle. 

Here is an example of issues you might have to cover:

• Are there any issues your team is currently facing? 
• Is a specific client giving them trouble? 
• Has anyone noticed a problem in your sales process?
• Is the customer experience positive or negative?
• Does anyone in the team need more guidance?
• Are you meeting your short and long-term goals?

After discussing your ongoing issues, you should ask your team if they have any questions or ideas. Your sales team has first-hand access to your customers and knows which pain points customers ask about the most. 

That is crucial information for the sales team and can help you reshape your sales process towards a better approach. 

Make sure your team members feel heard. 

Key takeaways 

Plan out your meetings in advance in order to reach your goals. 

You’re not listening to your team

If your team is constantly coming to you with ideas and you’re not taking them and bettering your sales process, you will have a high turnover rate. 

It’s essential for sales leaders to listen to their team and address their doubts. You have to make it easy for your team to come to you and share their ideas or ask questions. 

Employees that don’t feel appreciated and valued will look for other job opportunities. Don’t make that mistake, invest time in building relationships with your team members. 

Make sure you’re not using the sales tactics you teach when speaking to your team. You should be able to connect with your team members on a human level. Try to keep things friendly, instead of salesy. 

Key takeaways 

Make sure you’re proactively asking your team for input and giving them the right platform to get their complaints heard. 

You’ve put sales coaching on the back burner

Coaching is a never-ending process. If you don’t think so, it’s time to change your mind. Even your best-performing team members can profit from constructive criticism and guidance. 

Every time there’s a new product or feature you need to prepare your sales team and explain how to sell those solutions. Even if you haven’t rolled out any new products in a while, sometimes market changes require you to change your approach. 

Conducting in-depth research into your audience might show you unexpected ways your customers are using your solution. Make sure you’re talking to your customer success team and have the newest information on your audience. 

Being proactive will help you better understand your customers as well as the prospects that are engaging with your team.

Furthermore, it’s important to coach your sales team on more than just sales and your solution. 

They need to be coached on: 

• Communication
• Leadership
• Buyer personas
• Your brand
• Remote work and so much more

Make sure your coaching process creates better employees overall and helps your team members be more effective and independent. 

Monitor the productivity levels of your team and use the sales meetings to hype up your employees. 

Key takeaways 

Sales coaching should be an ongoing process that helps your team members achieve their goals. 

There is no accountability

Accountability is the key part to achieving success for your business. We’re sure you’ll agree that as soon as one person in the team is slacking, the whole process is slowed down or even unable to go on. 

Every person in your company should be held accountable for their work. This goes beyond your sales team because even if they’re doing their best, if the customer support team has a bad approach, you’ll have trouble converting leads. 

That’s why every team should track their members, as well as the success of their team. 

Internally, make sure you’re keeping your team members accountable with individual short-term and long-term goals. 

As always, accountability goes both ways. The sales leader should also be held accountable for their work and roles and responsibilities. You should be able to openly admit your mistakes and apologise when needed. 

Openly admitting your mistakes helps build your team’s confidence in you. Who would want to work with a person that can never admit they’re wrong?

Make sure that you’re openly discussing what’s progressing nicely in your sales meetings and who needs to change their approach in order to achieve better results. 

Key takeaways 

Holding your sales team accountable will help you run more effective sales meetings. Also, make sure you’re being held accountable for your roles and responsibilities. 

Conclusion

Running unproductive sales meetings can severely affect the productivity of your team members and in turn your revenue. Avoid making this mistake by following our actionable guide on running successful meetings. 

If you’re looking for ways to better your sales process, book a demo with our sales representatives and find out how Better Proposals can help you sell more. 

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