The Sales (W)rap Session: Ending Your Week With a Bang

Together Sales Strong

My name is Stu. And I am a salesman.

Stu

In some ways, sales is like a science experiment. We’re all scientists just trying to figure out the next formula for success. If you’re not experimenting, trying new things, techniques, spiels, emails, talk tracks, and targets you’ll lose the edge and be average. Now don’t get me wrong, in a fully functional, best-in-class rockin’ organization, with a knock it out of the park marketing department, somebody else does this for you and you just kick back and take the leads and opportunities.  But let’s get real. When’s the last time you said to yourself “Holy s**t, I’ve just got way too many inbound leads I don’t have enough time.”

In these COVID and post COVID times, without the benefits of constantly working in an office and building a team, many organizations have gotten away from what I call the Sales (W)rap Session.  At every organization I have ever worked with, and with all the teams I’ve led, we have always had an end of week 15 minute meeting to share what’s working and what’s not working. The value of this short meeting, and the lessons learned shared amongst the team, has always been a golden nugget just waiting to be plucked from the river.  Smart salespeople listen and learn and adapt and overcome. Constantly listening to the market, customers, prospects and especially peers better tackling the same challenges.

If you don’t do these meetings, I encourage you to set up a recurring meeting every Friday for 15 minutes. Get your buddies, your peers, and varied members of your team on a Zoom or Teams call to chat and share. I find that these are best suited for just reps and sales engineers, and if you sell in pods or teams, you’re BDR, SDR and the account managers.  Here are some tips to make the meetings productive, useful end of the highest value.

1.  No managers allowed – these are meant to share and be a peer-to-peer experience. Any time you get management involved it becomes a pipeline review and people will tune out.
2. Make it short and sweet – the average sales Rep has the attention span of a gnat,and god love’em for it.  Anything longer then 15 minutes on a Friday and people will stop attending.
3. No f*****g snowflakes – negative energy spreads like a Chinese designed virus through a sales team. This is not a ***** whine session, or therapy for Jenna the new sorority girl that is trying out sales this month. Keep it positive, upbeat and help those that need a helping hand with some direction and good feedback.
4. Share what’s working and what you’re doing that’s new – example: I tried a LinkedIn outreach that was short and sweet to chief financial officers and got 3 bites and set three meetings.  encourage group members to share templates and samples of what they’re using.
5. Share any news about the target market – a sales organization is really like an intelligence operation. Think about how many people your broader sales team touches in a work week. Everyone should have their ear to the ground and pick up on new motions and trends they are hearing from prospects and customers.
6. Focus some time on the competition – learning what the competition’s doing and saying can be invaluable in your overall sales posture.
7. Always a Team – we are all competitive, and love to be the top rep.  But in fast growing organizations, when everyone hits their targets, the love is spread around. More sales equals more marketing dollars, more inbound and outbound, more shows, and ultimately more leads and opportunities for you. Help a brother and a sister out, and you’ll see the gains.

Just thought I’d share on this topic, and give you a chance to do something that will have a real impact on your sales organization and your team when you’re out there banging the phones, working the virtual street and bringing in coin.