Another Sales Meeting?

Hello. Hello and welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly, your host. Thanks so much for joining me on another episode. I hope all is well in your world as we continue to roll through this brand new year of 2021. And today I'm going to be sharing with you some content that I don't know if I would say it's controversial, it's probably not the right word, but certainly it's ineffective and in many cases looked down upon or frowned upon because quite honestly, most people don't like them. What is it? Sales meetings. Yeah, you heard me, sales meetings. So today I'm gonna talk about first, the purpose. Should you have them? Right? Why should you have them? So we'll talk about the why part of it. Talk about who, who should lead sales meetings. What does that look like? I'll talk about how often you should be having sales meetings. And lastly, what should be included if you're gonna have a sales meeting, what should be included as part of the agenda? So I'm gonna get into all that today before I dive into the content. I do want to give that our all inclusive model of the Sitkins Network. This is our professional experience is officially up and running underway and our first actual training programs on sales, sales leadership, account management and CEO. Our leadership all start here in the coming weeks here in later January. So if this is something you have thought about or heard about before and go, wait, what would it look like to have every single person, at least the opportunity, you're not forced, but every single person in my agency who's involved in sales, sales, leadership, account management or service, and just overall leadership for the agency to have access to world class training programs provided by the Sitkins Group, to have monthly masterminds and peer reviews, to have a peer community around you to help support you, all of that included for one low price. In fact, if you're an agency that's less than $3 million in revenue, it starts at 497 and that price will increase as we move through 2021. So if you want to be part of something, an incredible experience to really help your agency sell more, retain more, earn more, all by leading more and more effectively and be surrounded by people who truly care about you, want to help with help, you Visit us@sitkins.com aim sitkins.com aim to learn more about it. Okay, so let's get into our content for today's podcast on sales meetings. Right now, I don't know if when I say sales meetings that excites you or like many people, it's like, oh, no, the dreaded sales meeting. And I spent 15 years as an insurance producer, and I can tell you that I've been to really good sales meetings and not so good sales meetings, right? I think we all have been if we've been part of some sales meetings in the past. But I want to address, again, four key areas and kind of walk you through again, whether your role specifically as an agency leader, whether you are the sales leader of your agency, maybe you're a producer who's kind of in a co role where you're a player coach, I think all of you. And actually even as a service person, to see what maybe sales meetings should look like. So whatever your role is in this, I think this is really important information to understand and to go through in a little more depth. Now, the first question is, why do we have them or should we have them? And I would just say this. If you are a sales organization, right? If you are a sales organization, you are an agency who is trying to grow your sales, then yes, you should have a sales meeting, right? It just seems like very common sense. But I think one of the problems that we see with agencies, insurance agencies, when it comes to sales meetings is that they miss the point. They miss the purpose of why we're having a sales meeting to begin with. And I think oftentimes, if we're not careful, we're not aware, we fall into the trap of, well, we have a sales meetings because we've always had a sales meeting. We have a sales meeting because someone told us we should have a sales meeting. We have a sales meeting because it's probably a good idea to have a sales meeting, right? Those aren't really purposeful reasons to have a sales meeting. And at Sitkins, we try to keep things very simple. In fact, when we teach and train in our sales leadership programs of why you have a sales meeting, it's really pretty basic and simple. The purpose of a sales meeting is so that your production team and sales leaders, whoever's involved, any insurance professional involved in the sales meeting, that insurance professional, in most cases producers, they leave the meeting a better professional or producer than when they arrived. That's why we have. The purpose is to get better. Always talk about the idea, best version possible. The purpose of a weekly sales meeting is to help people get better, right? Which actually kind of led in to. My next part is how often should you have them? I kind of gave it away there. If you listen weekly, and I don't mean weekly spelled W e A K, not week, like weekly sales meeting, but a weekly sales meeting. Then at least once a week, we as a sales organization are getting together to talk about key areas and strategies and behaviors. And I'll talk more about that in a minute, give you some ideas of that to help us become better. See what happens too often and again, doesn't mean that if you miss a week, the world ends, right? If you're not having one. But I will tell you the idea what typically happens and the narrative behind it is that we miss a week. Not a big deal. You know, in some cases, if you have them on Mondays, there's a holiday, we get all that. But then it's like, hey, let's not have it next week either. And then the next thing you know, it's, well, don't worry about it. Maybe next month we'll get back together. And what we're doing is we're building bad habits. And I also think, whether consciously or unconsciously, we are saying to the sales team, it's really not that big of a deal. Because here's the thing, if you as a sales leader, again, whatever your specific role is, maybe it's a dual role or de facto role, but if you as a sales leader, if you don't make it a big deal and we miss dates or multiple dates, why should your sales team think it's a big deal? I mean, they shouldn't and they won't. Right? And that's why oftentimes they come in and like, here we go again. I'm supposed to have this, let's get through it, right? Versus actually having purpose and intent. So how often again, to me, they should be done weekly. And we teach and train. The best agencies we see have a weekly sales meeting. They also have a monthly accountability or one on one with each of the producers. When done right, and each quarter, we do a quarterly sales retreat. I'm not going to get into all that. And again, maybe overwhelming some of you, but the idea is that if we are a sales organization, we are going to make it a priority to talk about how we can become a better sales organization, how we can become better sales professionals. And if we're not doing that again, we're consciously or even unconsciously saying, yeah, it's something. Right? It's something. So it needs to be at least every week. And I kind of mentioned already, who does this. There's got to be someone who leads these meetings. Sounds like a duh in a case in your agency, maybe you've got someone who's A designated sales leader. We see a lot of agencies where there really isn't a designated sales leader. They don't really have that title. But we need someone or someones to do that. And here's why this is so important. Because if we're going to have a sales meeting, there must be an agenda of some kind. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see insurance agencies make is that we don't really have someone or someones who's leading the meeting with intention. It's all, let's get together and something cool is going to happen. Now, can that transpire? Can you get in a room and you just talk some shot for a while? You can, but let's face it, what really happens in most of these situations is that people come in, they're not focused, they're not intentional, and it becomes a complain session. Right? We complain about carriers or we complain about certain situations or clients, or in some cases, heck, we complain about leadership. I mean, I've seen it all, right? And so we're not focused at the task at hand. So we've got to have a designated person or persons in some case who lead these meetings. Now, I will say this, and I'm going to get into some of the structure here in a second. I will say this, though, as an agency sales leader, right? Whether it's a specific title or just something that you are, again, the de facto sales leader of your agency. Either way, you don't need to put all the pressure on yourself. I think this is one of the things that's missing in many cases is that people, especially if you're not just a sales leader and your agency is kind of growing and you're getting to that point that they're like, I don't know always what to say. I don't always know what to do. And they feel this weighted pressure of I don't know how to put all this together. It's not perfect. Listen, the idea of the best sales meeting is not a presentation from you as a sales leader. It's a conversation with your entire team. There's a big difference. Yes, there still needs to be structure, yes, there still needs to be an agenda. But really a great sales meeting is you as a sales leader talking maybe 20% of the time, right? It's the rest of your team contributing and adding value. But you've got to facilitate it with structure, right? You've got to facilitate with structure. So let's talk about some of those areas. What should be included in. In a sales meeting? Now, this is our ideas that we share at Sitkins Group. And again, we go very deep in this, in our sales leadership program, which by the way, is part of our all inclusive model. It's just one other program that you get as an agency. But in the sales meeting itself, what should be included? Right. What should be some things that are part of that? I already mentioned, I believe every sales meeting should have an agenda just like it would be with your client or future ideal client. We want to set the intention of why we're here. There has to be a purpose to being here, otherwise you shouldn't have them. Right. If you just show up and randomly talk, can you make it something good? But you're going to get more bad things than good things that are going to happen long term. All right, so what should be included? Well, again, this is our philosophy on things. There isn't a perfect sales meeting agenda, but I think there's a ideal sales meeting agenda. I think like any sales agenda, there should be some type of opening thought. I think it's always important and typically the sales leader will do it. What's the opening thought? The state of mind that you want to create. Right. And this is where you really need to be a good communicator and work on that and prepare what's a powerful story, what's something that you can share with the team that's going to get them think a little bit differently? You know, one of the things we always tell producers is to open new files, which means we want to say something, ask a question that gets people engaged and thinking differently. I think that is a very powerful point of any good sales meeting because again, it's one of those things of kind of change in the state where most people come in. Oh, here we go again. You want to do something that's impactful, that does take a little bit of preparation for sure. Now there's some. Some things that I'm going to go through that I think are important in many sales meetings. Again, you got to find what's specifically right for you. But I want to share something that I think is unique and different of we've talked about with our sales leaders. I mentioned earlier that what is the purpose of a sales meeting? Well, and I said the ultimate purpose to me is that our producers, our sales team, our professionals leave better than when they arrived. And it's interesting to me that what happens in a lot of sales meetings is that we talk about some things, market conditions, certain accounts that we had and lost or wrote, whatever the case may be. And I'm going to talk about a few of those in a minute. And then we get to the very end and say, oh yeah, we were going to do some work, some low risk practices. We call it some training, some practice on asking questions, on referrals, on our 32nd commercial, on overcoming objections, right? Something like that. That's a low risk practice that we actually get our working on it, right, Practicing the skill and then we run out of time and go, oh yeah, okay, we'll do that next time. And to me, what happens is the most impactful, important thing of a sales meeting, which is to get better, is pushed to the end and never done, which to me doesn't make sense, right? And so I would state this. The beginning of the sales meeting, this is my perfect world, is we would do some form of low risk practice. And again, high risk practice, if you remember talking about this in other podcasts, high risk practice is when our producers go out in front of the best future ideal clients or client and do something stupid. Okay? They go out and don't ask the right question or respond inappropriately in different ways, whatever that may be. And that's high risk practice because we lose a client or we lose a possibility for sale. Low risk practice is when we screw up, we screw up in front of our own team. And that's okay, right? We're here to encourage, yes, we're here to challenge you, but we're here to encourage you to get better. If you mess up, if you say something weird, it's okay. We're going to get back at it and work on it and talk about it. So to me, low risk practice should be at the beginning of the, of every sales meeting. I think that needs to be a priority. In fact, most agencies simply don't do it right. And this is a great time to use that, the sales meeting, to get better at your craft. So I think after that, again, in whatever order you put this in, I think certainly have some form of producer reports where maybe you don't go through every account, right? This, whatever can be done via email or report, leave it at that, but maybe highlight the best accounts you wrote or referral you received, something that's going to be impactful. I think it's important to talk about market conditions, right? What's hot, what's not, what's new, talk about some of those things. And again, not that it becomes a complaint session, but let's take the information and turn it into a useful transformation for our agency personnel. I think we could also debrief lost accounts. One of the things that we don't want to talk about is hey, we lost an account. What happened? Right? Did we follow the process? Why did we lose the account? What should we do differently? Did this go back into the pipeline? Right. All those kind of things can be part of your sales meeting. So to me I think it really breaks down to this and you don't have to make this overly long. I think it needs to be an intention or thought to open the meeting. I think we need to have low risk practice. I think we have individual reports, I think we need to review market conditions. I think we should debrief lost sales and we could talk about some coverage discussions. Right. As well that need be. Obviously each meeting is going to be a little bit different in what you do. But I would just ask you as a leader listening to me, what are the non optionals for your sales meeting? That's what I would say. What are two or three things that are must in our sales meeting? Because ultimately I think if we can facilitate great discussion, we can get some low risk practice. We can get people excited and enthused about the week ahead. You know, whenever you're having this, most people have them on Mondays. You don't have to. But I would highly recommend starting your week off with impact right before you get into the craziness of the week that we are leaving the meeting again, better producers than when we arrived and that we can unleash this collective genius. I think it's so important that as an agency and certainly as a sales meeting with our sales producers, we are leveraging the power of a collective genius. What's the value of one great idea? Well, it may be shared in this meeting. So let's make sure that we open up the channels to discuss that. Sales meeting shouldn't be a cuss word, right. For your agency. They should be something that people are looking forward to. Why? Because it may take a while but they get at some point that my. I owe it to myself and my clients to be a better producer. And to be a better producer I need to be surrounded by ideas and resources and practice to become a better producer. That ultimately is the power of sales meetings. Again, if you are an agency looking for help in this particular area. This is one of our many programs that's part of our all inclusive model, the CRO Fit Chief Revenue Officer fitness program that we teach. There are four specific sessions and we go very deep. This is just one part of one session. We go deeper into sales meetings, we have conversations with our sales leaders. What are you doing? What's been impactful? How is it working? Share some of those ideas. We also have tools and resources that'll provide you directly that you can use for your sales team. Last thing to note, as well as part of our all inclusive model at Sitkins, is that every month, every single month, we run for your agency a sales meeting. So we are going to walk the walk. We're gonna provide some things, maybe in a different format that's gonna help your agency see things differently, but work with you by providing a once a month. So once a month you automatically get a sales meeting done for you, which people love. We're able to do that and you're gonna learn so much from not just from the coaches, but from other agencies as well. So again, if this sounds like something that you want to be part of our professional fitness experience, if you're an agency starting under 3 million in revenue now, that goes up. But under 3 million in revenue, it's $497 a month for the entire agency, for every member of the agency, for all of our programs. So take advantage of this. I know as we go through 2021, this price point will increase and would love for you to be part of this experience. Last thing I would share is this. If this podcast has provided value to you, I certainly would appreciate a review and a rating on itunes or Stitcher or wherever you listen. We're continually trying to grow this podcast. My goal and purpose at the Agent Leader Podcast is to help you, the agency leader, gain more clarity, build consistency in the right habits and behaviors, and to make that commitment, the commitment to become your best version possible. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.