Much has been written about the cost of unproductive sales meetings. For example, let’s assume that you have a weekly, one-hour sales meeting with 10 people on your team, and they make an average of $150,000 each per year. The cost of that one-hour meeting is $1,050. If you were to have 50 of those per year, the average annual cost of your sales meetings would be $50,250.

The questions you want to ask yourself are, “Are my sales meetings productive? Are they worth the time my salespeople aren’t out selling?”

 

Just for the heck of it, let’s overview ten reasons why salespeople don’t like to attend unproductive sales meetings. Here we go.

  1. The meetings are for the sake of having a meeting. There is no clear objective or goal for the meetings.
  2. The meetings don’t start on time, they don’t end on time, and they run too long.
  3. The meetings don’t start on a positive note or end on a positive note; and they don’t follow any sort of agenda. There is no consistent process or flow to the meetings.
  4. They aren’t really sales meetings, it’s an operations meeting, a status update, a gripe session, and the sales manager talks the whole time.
  5. Best practices, success stories and new ideas are not shared.
  6. There is no training, interactivity, or participation on the part of the sales team in the meeting. They don’t learn anything new or reinforce their skills.
  7. There is very little praise or recognition given to members of the sales team to acknowledge their performance.
  8. The tone of the meetings is negative. The team leaves feeling like they had a good ol’ fashioned country ass-whooping’. It’s a sales beating, not a sales meeting.
  9. The meetings are boring. The meetings are boring. The meetings are boring.
  10. As a result of the nine reasons above, salespeople show up to the meeting with a bad attitude. They would rather be out selling, making money, rather than sitting in the conference room, warming up a chair, trying to stay awake and checking their phone under the table, hoping the sales manager doesn’t notice.

You have probably not had anything as ridiculous as any of these ten things occur with your sales meetings. But, on the odd chance that you have, which of these ten reasons resonated with you and why?