Do You Hold Sales Meetings or Sales RALLIES?
As a sales manager, one of your toughest tasks is to come up with ideas for effective sales rallies.
Unfortunately, many sales rallies (a.k.a. meetings) are thrown together at the last minute and typically feature “guest speakers” who basically correct (a.k.a. verbally flog) the sales team for the way they operate.
I grew up in this type of sales “rally” environment. My fellow salespeople and I used to call them our, “Come to the meeting to get your beating.” If it wasn’t marketing telling us we weren’t maximizing the current promo properly, it was someone in management complaining that we didn’t follow the new contract process properly.
Imagine someone at the front of the room stomping around and wagging their index finger at you for an hour and a half. This wasn’t exactly an “inspirational event” designed to fire us up for the upcoming sales week.
If you want your team to have a “Let’s go crush it this week!” attitude, here are a few ideas to implement into your next rally (not meeting!).
- Adopt a seminar mentality before you plan your rally – As you put together an agenda, ask yourself, “Would each person attending be willing to pay money to attend this rally?” If not, you probably have some work to do. Your team should get boatloads of value out of the rally. Think tools, techniques and tenacity.
- Create the environment – My mentor in this industry, Marcia Dillon, was a master at creating the right environment in a sales rally. She took over a beaten down team and crafted a winning culture. How did she do it?
- Every meeting started and ended with upbeat music
- No negativity was ever allowed in the meeting
- The sales team is celebrated rather than tolerated
- The room is painted a more exciting color instead of asylum white
- Seats were often changed meeting to meeting. This created a different feel for each rally. Sometimes we were in a circle, a horseshoe or in classroom style.
- Have a weekly or monthly theme – There is an amazing synergy that occurs when your team focuses on the exact same thing. Of course, the theme is expressed in every interaction and communication. Examples of themes could be:
- “Simply The Best” (Compliments of Marcia Dillon)
- “Ask for the Sale on the First Visit!”
- “Customer Mission Before Commission!”
- “No Community Left Behind” – This is where everyone pulls together to focus/fix a non-performing community. The sales rally would actually be held at this community to kick off the week.
You get the idea. Whatever you want to focus on, get your team to rally behind it and watch what happens!
Be creative and make sure your sales rallies are worthwhile… for the people attending them!
Watch my FREE webcast and learn how to transform your sales meetings into sales rallies. You can watch the recording here.
