The sales meeting

How to run an efficient, time-saving sales meeting.
The strategic sales planning meeting should be a ray of light giving salespeople direction throughout the year. On the contrary, many companies give their sales reps sales targets without any real strategy for achieving them. If they don’t succeed, it’s easy for sales reps to blame marketing, targets that are too high or a lack of administrative support.
The strategic planning meeting takes place every year at the end of the year, in November or December, to prepare the objectives and strategy for the following year.

Composition of participants

The meeting brings together the Vice President of Sales, the Marketing Director, national and regional sales managers, major account managers, and possibly the managers of the administrative support units involved.

Sales meeting: the steps

Analysis of last year’s results

The first phase is to take stock of what went right and what went wrong last year. The VP presents the year’s figures in terms of sales and customer satisfaction, and then proceeds with the evaluation. This evaluation should not be targeted, but broad-based. It’s not uncommon for sales reps to blame marketing or support units. A good evaluation should review everything: sales reps, sales managers, regions, support departments, management.

Presentation of product and market data

Phase two is the presentation of current and future data by the VP and marketing regarding the company’s products (the so-called “pipeline”) and market opportunities: competition, changing consumer tastes, new regulations.

The cascade of sales targets

Phase three sees the presentation of the year’s objectives at national and regional level, together with the accompanying commission and motivation plans. The task of the regional managers is then to cascade these objectives by representative.
The presentation of the data should give rise to an analysis of this information by the participants, in collaboration with the marketing team, in an attempt to make sense of the information.

The strategy

Following the presentation of objectives and analysis, the VP proposes his sales strategy, which he can validate with his sales managers. The aim of the strategy is to optimize the use of the company’s resources by determining priority targets, taking into account the opportunities offered by the market and the competition. There are generally three types of strategy: offensive, defensive or niche exploitation.
The national strategy must then be transposed to each of the regions by the regional managers.
If we stop here, then everyone has wasted their time, because nothing will be implemented. The next step is to translate this strategy into concrete sales force actions: the solution is to create A, B, C and D customers according to the criteria defined in the strategy. The tool used to classify them is generally a two-dimensional matrix into which the customers are divided. The next step is to determine the offer, the strategy and the sales pitch to be presented to each of these customer categories.

The final planning phase

The planning phase of the sales meeting is the most laborious and falls to the regional managers; they must carry out their customer management planning for each defined customer type (also known as “Account Planning”). They then need to allocate their “strike force”, i.e. the number of potential visits available to them, by customer type A, B, C and D.
It’s also important to plan ways of improving salespeople, such as sales training, coaching, team-building activities, etc. Many people hate sales meetings. Many people hate sales meetings because they’re a waste of time, even though they’re an excellent tool when used properly.

Jean-Pierre Mercier

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