Pump Up the Meeting

Before Pam Lontos made the switch to sales consultant she worked as a sales manager at KMGC, a dismally-rated radio station in Dallas, TX, where she vowed she would not repeat her previous employer’s meeting style. “I’d listen to Zig Ziglar tapes in the car on the long drive into work and I’d arrive pumped up and ready to sell,” she says. “Then I’d go into a meeting where this guy would yell at us about how low the numbers were. By the time I got out of there I wanted to crawl back into bed.”

When Lontos took over as sales manager, she decided to shake things up. She filled the room with loud, upbeat music and made sure every meeting was purely motivational and educational, with plenty of time invested in off-the-wall role-playing. Did her approach work? “The more pumped up the meeting, the bigger the sales that day,” says Lontos, who now teaches the methods she perfected.

Did her methods have an impact on sales? The proof is in the numbers. Within one year, sales had increased by 500 percent – even though the station’s ratings remained low.

Face it: meetings, whether successful or deadly dull, cost you money – lots of it. Gather eight professionals together who draw an average salary of $40,000 each and the company cost is $320 per hour, or nearly $6 a minute, according to Sharon Lippincott, author of Meetings: Do’s, Don’ts and Donuts: The Complete Handbook for Successful Meetings.

Viewed in that light, can you afford to put on boring meetings? Can you afford to leave your sales force demoralized? Of course not. But here’s good news. Experts who know how to electrify meetings are ready to help sales managers plan meetings that get results.

Know the Objective
You cannot get there if you don’t know where “there” is. That’s why setting objectives should be your first stop in creating effective meetings. Sounds simple? It isn’t, assures James O’Rourke, director of the Fanning Center for Business Communication at Notre Dame. He itemizes five steps that insure every meeting reaches its objectives:

Clarify your objectives.
What do you want people to learn, what behavior do you want to change, what information or recognition do you want to present? Note: boosting morale is not itself a valid reason for holding a meeting, says O’Rourke: “If you just want to make them happy, it doesn’t happen in a meeting room. Let them go to Hawaii on their own without the management team,” says O’Rourke.

Link meeting objectives to the strategic objectives of the company, says O’Rourke. “Find ways to link the company’s objectives to the sales staff, then make the objectives known to the sales team. Management often thinks the sales staff doesn’t need to know the objectives,” says O’Rourke. “I argue the more they know about the direction of the company, the better. It gives them more reason to come to work in the morning.”

The objective must be measurable, observable or rewardable. “Companies spend a lot of money on meetings, with no idea of the outcome,” says O’Rourke. Don’t let that happen to you. Always establish measurable objectives – and then take your measurements afterwards so that you can continue to improve meeting effectiveness.

Sounds simple? It is – but how many meetings can you tick off that failed to set clear objectives, either to participants or organizers? By setting clear objectives at the outset, the meeting planner knows what the goal is and so do the meeting participants. Setting objectives at the front-end points in the direction of a dazzling show.

Choose the Right Meetings Space
Getting results, step two: choose a meeting space that meshes with your objectives. Won’t any room work? Nope, say the pro meeting planners. Whether it’s a resort in Bermuda or the conference room down the hall, it must match your objectives to be effective.

Listen up: “Great meetings don’t just happen – they’re designed,” says Michael Begeman, a meeting planner, facilitator and manager of the 3M Meeting Network, an on-line resource and compendium of experts and resources assembled by 3M. He ticks off some of the possible venues: a splashy destination resort with a wealth of extracurricular activities to promote group bonding…a smaller hotel with private meeting space so salespeople can unwind and talk outside the office structure…or maybe the office itself will make a good venue – so long as the planner throws in a bit of creativity during the planning phase.

Different venues will produce different outcomes, says Begeman, so it’s imperative to keep your objectives in mind. Case in point: for annual sales meetings that bring together salespeople from across the country, Begeman stresses team building through shared, fun activities. Crucial to this is a destination that offers plenty of diversion. Isn’t that wasted time? Not when a skilled planner works out the details. Begeman, for instance, doesn’t end the workday with the last meeting: “From 5 p.m. ‘til the wee hours, I plan fun – shared experiences to keep the group together,” he says. “It’s cocktails here, dinner there, tickets to a show and so on.” After four days of work and fun, the team achieves a closeness akin to summer camp.

Not every meeting requires such an extravagant outlay of cash and time. At GoldMine Software Corporation in Los Angeles for instance, the company’s regional sales managers meet in private suites at a local hotel for meetings. This environment provides the perfect atmosphere away from the office, and a casual dress code breaks down barriers between department heads and salespeople in the field, says Dan May, a regional sales manager for GoldMine. “Environment is important,” he says. “You can’t do this kind of meeting in the office. It has to be off-site, away from work or you’re not really focused on the subject at hand.”

While conventional wisdom favors off-site locales, there are ways to take salespeople out of their environment without leaving the office. If your meeting goal includes generate new ideas from within the sales team, the conference room can work if the inspiration to think more creatively comes from within, says Gordon MacKenzie, former creative genius at Hallmark Cards and now a lecturer on maintaining creativity within bureaucratic environments as well as the author of Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace.

“Often companies go to a retreat which is supposed to help them focus,” he says. “But they should be learning how to do it themselves.” A case in point: As part of a task force to generate new conference formats for the annual regional sales conference for Ambassador Cards, MacKenzie transformed what could have been a deadly meeting into something extraordinary with candles, Tibetan cymbals and a mind exercise that led the group of twelve through the visualization of ‘letting go.’

“The group exploded,” he says. “The shell of their corporate reserve split open, and a breathtaking flood of pent-up, common-sense know-how transformed their arid, grey conference room into a cauldron of creativity. Eagerness, enthusiasm and optimism filled the air. Everyone threw ideas on the table with joyous abandon. People were listening, seizing others’ ideas and vaulting to the next plateau.”

Which venue works best for you? The answer hinges in part on budget – but it always hinges on who will attend and what objectives you set. When you clarify your goals the proper forum likely will present itself.

Pump it Up
Important as the space itself is, how you use it may be even more critical. Remember: Dull meetings regularly happen at the greatest destinations. How to prevent that? To keep participants’ minds on the agenda instead of the golf course, pump up the meeting with interactive programs, says Lontos, who is known for throwing frisbees out into the audience to get responses. “You have to get to people’s emotions,” she says. How does she do it?

Her meetings feature an emotional role-playing session, such as one between a salesperson who is blocked, having reached a selling plateau, and his subconscious. A salesperson will say, “I’m going over $20,000 this month,” and the other player (his subconscious) will contradict and pick on him. Lontos used to stage this as a pillow fight, but now she just lets them yell at each other. “I still get more letters on the results of this technique than any other,” she says. “Sales always go way up for the salesperson after one of these sessions.”

Mel Silberman of Active Training in Princeton, NJ, and author of 101 Ways to Keep Meetings Active: Sure Fire Ideas to Engage Your Group, says, “Meetings are often dull and deadly. There are lots of interesting and fun things you can do to get the juices flowing, and they can be done very quickly.”

Such as? Brainstorming is one way to rev up a group’s energy. “Lots of meetings have brainstorming sessions, but most people only know one way to brainstorm,” says Silberman. “They throw out ideas in rapid-fire succession and someone puts them on a flip chart.” The drawback? This technique favors those who are quick on their feet. Among Silberman’s 15 strategies for brainstorming are “Slow Brainstorming” (people write down ideas privately, then each shares an idea with the group for positive discussion), “Brainwriting” (write an idea on a card and pass it around for each person to ‘piggyback’ an idea onto the original thought) and “Brainwalking” (place ideas on newsprint and tack it to the walls; people walk around the room to ink in their thoughts). Whatever strategy you use, Silberman suggests sorting the resulting ideas into ‘keepers,’ ‘maybes’ or ‘holdoffs.’

Silberman also recommends active exercises for ending a meeting. Have each participant make a bumper sticker that encapsulates the main message of the meeting, or create a human tunnel and have each person walk through and give a high five, like football players running onto the field. Whatever you do, advises Lontos, never ask people to do something you wouldn’t.

She adds: “At a sales meeting you can never forget that you have to work to keep the audience’s attention and enthusiasm. And keep on doing it – that’s a big secret for making meetings work.”

Straight Talk
Will a speaker rev up the sales team – or leave them shaking their heads at the waste of money involved in importing a big name know-nothing? Know that, valuable as speakers can be in motivating the sales team, not every speaker – no matter how big a name – will do. And many meeting planners get this wrong. The failure in bringing in an entertaining, motivational speaker “…is that the vast majority of speakers fail to localize their material to the industry or the region,” says O’Rourke. “They deliver pre-packaged speeches identical to last week’s delivery for another industry. The best speakers construct a speech or presentation that fits your situation.”

“You do need to be selective about the kind of speaker you choose,” agrees Begeman. “You don’t want a speaker who has overcome great hardships in life to become a success. It’s a good story, but it doesn’t relate to sales.”

What kinds of speakers produce effective talks? Sometimes low-cost or no-cost speakers do the best work, and Begeman gives a case in point. When he wanted a speaker at regional sales meetings for a major cellular phone company, he sought out a local entrepreneur who had built his business from scratch using guerilla sales techniques. Why? “The most effective speaker at these regional meetings are the ones who make their own TV ads that run on the 10 p.m. news or who have set up the biggest chain of discount carpet warehouses,” says Begeman. “These aren’t speakers for executives, but for out-on-the-street salespeople – people in their 30s with dreams of becoming a master salesman – who can relate to the selling and the success.”

For national sales meetings, Begeman ratchets up a level. “The scrappy people who achieved great success through innovative sales techniques are very motivational,” says Begeman, who cites Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines as especially dynamic. More broadly, the bigger the audience, the bigger the name you need to put in front of them – but never stray from the notion that only successful salespeople themselves need apply. That’s how to get a close, turned-on hearing from a sales force, say the experts.

Last Call
Invest in the minds of your sales team with meetings that work and you’ll be guiding them toward realizing their own, and the company’s, potential. When you identify and communicate objectives and mix a good dose of fun, motivation and recognition into the more weighty issues, every meeting will reach the objectives you set. “Sales meetings can and should be terrific tools in keeping any sales force energized,” says Lontos. “Putting on an effective meeting isn’t rocket science – but when you do it, it just may seem your sales team is on rocket fuel. Results can be that quick and dramatic.”