High-Energy Team Meetings Produce Top Tier Results

I promise you, this is so far from anything that you've ever been to. And now. All right, I love this Tuesday team advance day. We say advance because we do not retreat. Right. We're always advancing. So this is setting up a good, clear expectation around what are our team meetings, what are our team buyer meetings like I like doing setting a good expectation around what's coming. Let me also interject, occasionally I will have a prospective agent that's not on the team yet. I would have them sometimes come into a buyer's meeting just to observe. And so we get to know them a little bit better and they get to know us a little bit better. It's always a two way street as we're looking to find the right fit and the right person, the right seat on the bus. But once they're on the team, I just like to walk them through specifically, you know, what our team meetings like, what can they expect, what's our rhythm, flow and structure. I explain to them what positive focus is. I unpack everything that we kind of do and so they can have a good, clear expectation of what those meetings are like. Super excited just about our meeting flow and rhythm as we go into 2016. As a lot of you know, we shared last week, we've got a new tracker that we're incorporating called KDA and by the end of the weekend we had just almost everybody kind of reporting in and getting into the, into the system and reporting their numbers on a daily basis. So a little off track there, but just excited about an example of flow and something we'll cover in meetings. Meetings are very training focused too. We want to making sure we sure we're bringing really good ideas to the team and dealing with real world problems, having good, healthy group discussions at meetings as well as hitting things like the numbers or right now we're running a contest around opportunity time and answer rate percentages and so we're having a contest around who's got the highest answer rate percentage right now. And then we'll also have a contest around who's completing the most appointments from opportunity time and giving out a couple of gift cards at the end of the year. So just trying to keep things fresh, trying to keep things exciting in a positive competitive environment. So those are just some examples of our advance our buyers meeting advance. And then we also do after our buyers meeting we have a team meeting as well where our whole company comes together and we're sharing our raving fan reviews. We're talking about or we're dropping what we call dropping Rocks. You can see right down there, we're looking at our leaderboard. We're celebrating. We're ringing the bell, if you will. We have a bell in our office where once a month we're ringing the bell for each family that we serve. Right. Each sale that we wrote. If there's reward, we have rewards and incentives. If people are hitting those marks, that's the energy, that's the positive energy we're bringing into those team meetings. So those are just. So I take people through instead of just saying, hey, welcome to the meeting. I take people through as part of fast start the expectations. So that way when everybody goes to get their closing rock to drop in the big rock bin, they aren't wondering what's going on. But I give the brand new agents their 24 rocks for their first year and then it's more meaningful to them that they feel more connected. So I think it's really important that you do go through the framework and the agenda of your team, of your buyer meeting, of your team meeting, the meetings that they're part of and so they understand what's going on within the organization and they feel a greater part of it. And I just think we get a lot more bang out of the buck there. Team meetings like this or buyer meetings are mandatory. It's not an optional meeting for us at all. Everybody on the team is expected to be there, just like you would in any championship team, of course, and that they bring a level of positive energy to it. And then I guess the last thing I would say on this for all of us is how important the area of preparation would be. I'm always thinking this through for myself and needing to challenge myself more and more each week to bring a higher level of preparation to the meeting as it relates to the content. It's, you know, it's kind of think of it as, you know, I don't know, a church setting, right? The pastor's going to go, you know, before the congregation, you know, he's going to, he's going to be prepped, he's going to be ready to go. And so the analogies that you share, the training you offer, the energy you bring, the quotes you bring in, the level of facilitation, maybe, because maybe it's a facilitation type meeting that you're dialoguing around challenges that people, people are having. Your ability to ask good questions and provide good insight is critical. So I would say and really challenge everybody on this call to really think through their team advances and their team meetings. And wherever you're at, bring those up to a higher level. From preparation, from a creativity standpoint, from a content standpoint. Always be looking for fresh bread, as I like to say, interesting things you can bring in and value, value, value. What value can you bring? Because that's the burden right on us as leaders is if the agents are asked or the agent is asked at the end of the meeting, was that valuable? Was it helpful? Did I feel connected? Did I learn something? We need the answer to be yes. And that's a challenge. A leadership challenge is to where we're all busy, is to bring that kind of intentionality and that kind of preparation and that kind of energy around these 50 minutes to an hour is typically what they last.