Posted By Chris on July 16, 2009

We had a well-attended webinar called Running Great Sales Meetings Every Time yesterday morning. I had stayed up until 2 AM that morning updating the slide show. You can download my latest slides from this session here on our site. You’ll find them in the Webinar Content section underneath the Free Content tab at the top of the page.

Here’s today’s Jolt: If you run the sales meeting in your company, I urge you to start with the purpose of the meeting, rather than the length. You have been brainwashed (indoctrinated and conditioned by years of propaganda) to call a meeting of a certain length and then fill it with content (and in some cases tedious content).

If many meetings weren’t tedious for so many people, we wouldn’t need articles like Horrible Meeting Mistakes offering advice like this: Sleeping, sighing, slouching in your chair, hair tossing/touching/smoothing, spinning in your chair, leaving the room, eating loudly and making rude gestures or facial expressions are all distracting, rude and disrespectful.

Starting with the length is not a best practice. However, it is the norm for meetings as well as for training sessions.

You’ve no doubt participated in one or more of the following:

• A 1/2 day semiar
• A 4-day boot camp
• The 1-hour Monday morning sales meeting
• A 2 1/2 day golf academy
• A 5-hour class over a 16-week semester

Most of this madness stems from academia (a miserable mess in many parts). School boards dictate how many days and what curriculum constitutes a 1st grade education and so on for the next 12 years.

Once you go to college it’s more of the same.

You automatically accept that an undergraduate degree takes X number hours of course work and 4-years. You and your parents buy into this and spend a small fortune chasing the degree. Upon graduating, about half of what you have learned is already obsolete. (That’s right. The half life of a college education is about 4-1/2 years.)

Of course colleges have huge physical plants and need money from students and alumni to perpetuate this Industrial Age system. And besides all that, college is a lot of fun.

One of the slides in the show you can download contains this quote from In Search of Learning Intelligence:

“Learning continues to shift from being discrete and event-based to becoming continuous and imbedded into workflow”.

You’ve been brainwashed. (Nothing wrong with that.) But I’m trying to help you “get your mind right.” One small step is to start with the outcome or purpose of the meeting instead of the hours or days it is going to take to accomplish this outcome.

For your sake and the sake of your team, plan one with Purpose. And let people know a day or three in advance what that purpose is so they can prepare and contribute. Then, tell them how long you think the meeting will run. And try to end early.

Fuel your future,

Chris

(2 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Categories: Better Sales Meetings, Sales Improvement, Time Management
Tags: