By Dave Fellman
My last few articles for this newsletter have been about staff meetings, first about “all hands” meetings and then about sales meetings. Over the last few months, I have written that I think you should be having daily, weekly and monthly meetings with your salespeople.
The daily and weekly meetings are for covering the nuts and bolts of selling and sales management. Beyond that, at least once each month, I think you should also sit down and talk about performance. This could be a 20-30 minute extension of a regularly scheduled weekly meeting, or it could be a separate session. Several of my clients like to have these monthly sales meetings over breakfast or lunch.
The agenda for this meeting should start with numbers—in other words, performance against goals, both monthly and year-to-date. After that, the discussion should move on to more subjective issues—in other words, each party’s level of satisfaction with the way things are going, and what should be done to resolve any problems. This is an opportunity for open and honest communication—which is how problems get solved!
Now it’s time to address the elephant in the room. Daily, weekly and monthly. That’s a lot of meetings. That’s a lot of management! And no one, especially salespeople, wants to be micro-managed.
So here’s my bottom line. No one has ever died from too much sales management, but far too many printing salespeople have underperformed because they didn’t get enough. If you don’t have any underachievers, please feel free to ignore what I’ve written over the last couple of months. But if you do, more and better management is the key to changing that reality. More meetings – with purpose and intent! – can help you to improve the performance of your salespeople.
Dave Fellman is the president of David Fellman & Associates, Cary, NC, a sales and marketing consulting firm serving numerous segments of the graphic arts industry. Contact Dave by phone at 919-363-4068 or by e-mail at dmf@davefellman.com. Visit his website at www.davefellman.com.