Does your sales team come to weekly sales meetings as if they're marching into a POW camp? Dragging their feet, fearful of what's about to come and longing for their freedom?

Maybe you do the same thing from your side!

How can you avoid this? You could always hold fewer meetings. But the problem isn't how often you meet, it's what you meet about. If your sales reps know they'll be bored by meandering discussions and stressed by being held accountable in front of the entire team, no wonder they'd rather be almost anywhere else.

But it doesn't have to be like that. Let me walk you through six easy rules that will make your sales meetings far more effective - and even put a few smiles on the faces around the table.

Be clear about your overall sales goal:
It might sound obvious, but what is your objective for the sales team? A higher dollar volume? A better closing rate? More lead generation? Shorter sales cycles? Once you're clear on this, it's easier to have focused and useful meetings.

Develop a battle plan:
The route to your objective might be clear to you, but is it clear to your team? If you were about to lead an army unit into battle, you'd gather around a map showing your current location, the target and how you plan to get there. You should do the same with your sales team - although you might not want to give them any live ammo.

Here's a simple but effective exercise to get your team fired up and focused on your sales plan. You'll need a roll of kraft paper, masking tape and felt markers. First, start unrolling the paper and tape it to the wall so it runs around the room. That alone will pique your team's curiosity. Then, starting at the left end of the paper, get your team to help you spell out the steps in your sales process as a continuous path. Write down everything! The writing will likely become quite messy as you and your team add more and more steps. That's fine. The point isn't to win marks for neatness, but to get your salespeople energized by this exercise, which may take several meetings to complete.

Leave the paper up between meetings, encouraging team members to come by anytime and add Post-it Notes for any steps that have been missed. By the end of this exercise, your team will have achieved something crucial: they'll have turned this into their sales process.

You'll also have an instant agenda for meetings stretching well into the future, provided you devote each meeting to a single step in the sales process. And the fact that your team members now understand how each step fits into the whole should lead to more productive discussions.

Arrive having done your homework:
Read authors such as Brian Tracy or Jeffrey Gitomer to get ideas and topics to focus on for effective sales management. And to learn how to have better meetings, read Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business by Patrick Lencioni.

Stick to no more than two key points per meeting:
To keep your meetings concise and the message clear, figure out in advance your answer to the question "What's the one thing, or two, at most, that I want my team to take away from this meeting?" If, for instance, the first step in your sales process is to "Define our perfect customer," then stick to that topic during the meeting, although within the context of this being just one step in your process.

Balance accountability with education:
Let's face it - performance accountability is the part of their jobs your team really dreads. Yet a good sales meeting shouldn't focus primarily on this. Gather the sales data from your reps quickly and at the start of the meeting. Tell them that all you want for now are the numbers, not the stories behind them, because the latter typically chews up way too much time. Save the stories for later one-on-ones with your reps so you can make education the primary focus in your team meetings.

Take these meetings seriously:
Everyone should understand that they're a core part of the way you do business and that nothing, other than an emergency, will supersede that. I think Monday morning at 8:30 is a fine time to hold your meetings. Sure, you'll get some grumbles, but starting then will get your people into the office and working - and focused on the week ahead.

Punctuality is critical, too. You have to be on time and ready to go if you expect your team to do the same. Reinforce this by starting on time rather than letting latecomers hold you up. If you do that, the slowpokes will soon get the message.

From Canadian Business Online By Dominic Rubino