TRAINING
Bored Meetings
Philip Bowden asks, do your sales meetings inspire real action? They should!
I
was asked once to help a senior manager to develop as part of a long- term programme. During this process, I sat in one of his regular
sales meetings and observed. The meeting was pretty unspectacular to say the least and I could see that the other attendees were far from pleased having to sit through the early evening and getting very little in return. There was little ‘passion’ shown by any one!
Does this sound familiar? Firstly why do we hold meetings? When I asked the manager this, the look I got said it all. The reason why this meeting took place on a monthly basis was purely down to habit. It’s what managers do. The meeting was a fixed item in the monthly round of events and the style of the meeting had been copied and handed down over the years from one predecessor to the next.
46 JULY 2012 PROPERTYdrum
If you know what you want from a meeting in the first place the
preparation is simple.’ PHILIP BOWDEN BOWDENTMS
So we set about changing things The first issue we addressed was why the meeting was held in the first place. There could be several reasons: to spread information, to build the team, to instruct, to share best practice or to plan. The manager thought about this and decided that normally he wanted three things from
this monthly get together. Firstly to have impact by building a sense of team and purpose, secondly to share ideas that work and finally to make sure everyone was going into the next sales period with a workable plan. I could see that he was starting to feel much better and developing a better attitude toward next month’s meeting. The second issue was to look at proper
preparation. Like most sales people his time management was poor, his priorities ruled by too many demanding issues. I could see that sometimes this was inescapable; however, it not always the case. I do not expect line managers to spend days preparing, however, to go to the meeting with no preparation is unacceptable. If you know what you want from the meeting in the first place it makes the preparation much simpler. The third issue focused on the skills to run the meeting with impact. The main
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