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Weekly sales meetings can either make up the backbone of an innovative sales culture or be the bane of your reps' existence.

When reps start dreading meetings, they stop participating. Collaboration decreases. Communication is stifled. Reps are left feeling alienated, unsupported, and frustrated.

How can you tell if your weekly meetings are not enhancing your reps' ability to do their jobs? Here are some telltale signs.

1) You don't keep to a consistent schedule.
2) Reps often miss in-person meetings or fail to join via conference call.
3) Reps seem unprepared, disinterested, or unfocused.
4) You lack a specific agenda.
5) You often run over allotted time.
6) Follow-up on action items is rare.

There are some very specific approaches you can take to get back on track and start leveraging your weekly meetings to foster innovation, inspire creative thinking, and help reps feel empowered. Here are four tips, based on the management practices of Michael Robertson, Director of Premier Sales at Egencia, the global corporate-travel division of Expedia.

1. Solicit problems. Sales professionals tend to carry around a lot of frustrations. When these pile up, the problems can start to seem insurmountable. A weekly meeting is an ideal opportunity to rout out problems. "Identifying a problem is the first step to finding a solution," says Robertson. "That's where innovation begins."

2. Encourage failure. If you're not failing, then you're not trying new things. If you're not trying new things, you're not innovating. "People need to be free to tell you how things didn't work," Robertson says. "It's part of a culture of 'get better.' As long as you're getting better, you're on your way to great."

3. Ask reps what customers need. Because they operate on the front lines, sales reps are in the best position to pick up on shifts in buyer behavior and market trends. "Half of our sales meetings are focused on questions related to what's happening in the market," says Robertson. "We discuss what we need our product to do to meet the needs of customers."

4. Highlight what's working. "I will often ask, 'Who's got a great story from last week?'" Robertson says, "or, 'Who figured out something that really worked?'" You can also try alternating problems and solutions. "One week we might talk about a problem, and the next week we'll talk about the solution," he adds.

Making solutions a part of the meeting is a key driver of positive behavior, says Robertson … but only if the company culture supports the sales team's suggestions. Egencia sees its weekly sales meetings as part of a culture of collaboration.

"We look to our teams to understand what's working and what isn't," says Melissa Cole, Egencia's Manager of Learning and Development. "We are constantly reaching out to the team to ask, 'If you could have anything in the world to make you successful, what would that be?'"

For example, the idea of leveraging social selling came as a "groundswell" from the sales team, says Cole. Today, Egencia credits using InsideView for "social prospecting" for the sales team's robust pipeline; Cole initially heard of InsideView from a rep who saw a demo of the application at an industry event. Not only does InsideView enable Egencia reps to capture social information to make connections with prospects, its ROI Dashboard allows them to track the specific amount of pipeline they generate using social connections.

This tech-savvy approach has helped Egencia's sales team enhance its prospecting efforts and keep a selling edge in the competitive travel-services market. As Robertson says, "If we're going to synchronize our sales cycle with the new prospect buying cycle, we need to be able to introduce ourselves into that cycle earlier.

"People want tools that will help them be successful individually and will help the team succeed," adds Robertson. "I could sit there in team meetings and ask, 'What are you going to close this week?' But when you ask, 'What can we do better? What have you figured out that works?' I find that you get a better dialogue."