The Sales Mastery Podcast · Episode 18

The Meeting Rhythm

With James Denny · Sales Geek

Eight people, one hour, forty-six weeks. That is 368 hours of selling time a year, and it is the biggest recurring investment most sales leaders make. So the weekly sales meeting is worth rebuilding properly.

Eight people in a room for one hour a week, across a working year, comes to 368 hours of selling time. It is not a fancy statistic, though. It is eight times one times forty-six, and you can do the arithmetic yourself. What makes it strange is how few of us have ever written down what that hour is supposed to produce.

Monday morning, nine o’clock. Eight people around a table, or eight faces on a screen. You go round them one at a time and everybody reads out where their deals are, all of which you could have read yourself in the CRM. Then somebody mentions a problem, four of them pile in to solve it, and twenty minutes vanish into a single deal that concerns maybe two people in the room. Somebody says shall we take that one offline, which means no. At five to ten you run out of time, so you say right, good week everyone, and eight people wander back to their desks.

So what got decided in that hour?

Where this sits in the series

Last time we talked about onboarding, and how it installs the standard your team works to. This episode is about the thing that holds that standard in place week to week. The next one is about what happens when it slips.

And I have not even counted the longer monthly get-togethers or the quarterly sessions in that 368 hours. It is only the Monday meeting.

This whole episode hangs on one difference, and we see it everywhere. Having meetings just means they are in the diary. Having a rhythm means every one of them has a specific job to do, they happen at a frequency that matches that job, and everybody knows which kind of meeting they are in. Most teams, however, have the first without the second.

The test that gives it away

If the same conversation could reasonably break out in three different meetings in your week, you have not got a rhythm. So if a problem with a deal gets raised on Monday, then again in the one to one, then again in the monthly review, and nobody on your team thinks that is odd, what you have is repetition.

Repetition is dangerous, because it feels like thoroughness while producing very little. It also survives for years on exactly that feeling.

What repetition really costs

The real cost is not the wasted hours. Rather, it is that when anything can be discussed anywhere, nothing ever has to be resolved anywhere. There is always another meeting coming, so the difficult conversation about the deal that is going nowhere can always wait for the next one.

A while back I did an episode on pipeline velocity and what it costs you when deals stall. A good deal of that stall is manufactured right here, in meetings where nobody was ever required to commit to anything.

The cost you cannot see

There is a second cost, and it is harder to spot. Your best people, meanwhile, hate it. They can tell the difference between a meeting that helps them and a meeting that reports on them, and if you run enough of the second kind they stop bringing you problems early. Instead they bring them late, once you have run out of options, which is the worst possible moment for you to hear about anything.

When anything can be discussed anywhere, nothing has to be resolved anywhere.

A sales team needs four separate rhythms, and I think of them as four clocks each ticking at its own pace. The mistake almost everyone makes is not having too many meetings. It is running all of them at the same speed, so the daily questions and the quarterly questions end up crammed into the same room.

In defence of the daily ten minutes

People resist this one hardest, though, so let me defend it. Somebody cannot get hold of a decision maker. Somebody needs a price signed off in ten minutes. Most of that gets unblocked on the spot, whereas the alternative is that it sits there for four days waiting for Monday.

In the early weeks you may well get flooded with things that are in the way. But as you clear them, the list thins out, either because you have removed the blockage for good or because the team has learned to spot and shift it themselves.

What the quarterly clock is for

Skills, territories, targets and, above all, what you are going to stop doing. So book all four clocks a year ahead, and do it today, because you will never get round to it once you are under pressure.

This is the tool that will clear space in your diary, and it comes from a simple observation. Every meeting in a sales business is trying to do one of four jobs. If a meeting does none of them, it should not exist, and if it tries all four at once it does none of them well and always overruns.

Never coach and commit in the same room

This is the rule that matters most, and it is the reason the weekly clock has two hands. Coaching needs somebody to be straight about what they cannot yet do, so they often have to admit a weakness. Committing needs the opposite, because it asks them to stand up in front of their peers and say I have got this.

Think about what you are asking if you put both in one meeting. In the first half, tell me where you are weak. In the second half, tell everyone in this room how you are going to smash it. Nobody can do both, and they will feel awkward if you make them try. So they pick one, and it is always the confident one, which means the coaching stops happening at all.

The fix is structural rather than a matter of willpower. Your one to one is a coaching meeting, full stop, and it does not review the pipeline. Pipeline gets reviewed in the team meeting instead, where commitment in front of your peers is the whole point of being there.

Something to do with your diary this week

First, take your diary and write one of those four words next to every recurring meeting on it. Inform, decide, coach or commit. Any meeting you cannot put a single word next to, cancel. And I do mean cancel it, then tell people why and see who complains. In my experience almost nobody does.

Your weekly sales meeting is the expensive one, so it is worth getting right, and the reason it takes a full hour is that it is doing the wrong job. Going round the table while everybody reads out their numbers is an inform job. Inform is also the one job a meeting almost never needs to do, because those numbers are already sitting in the CRM. And if they are not sitting in the CRM, reading them out loud on a Monday does not fix that either.

So the weekly sales meeting gets one job. Decide and commit on the deals that need it this week. Not every deal, just the ones the room can do something about. Thirty minutes.

What should a weekly sales meeting agenda look like?

Before it starts, everybody updates the CRM, because that is part of your standards. Each person then flags two deals to bring to the table. I prefer one immediate deal, closing this month or inside sixty days, and one in the rolling quarter, which gives you a now priority and a very soon priority.

1. Minutes 0 to 3, yours. State the number, where you are and what you need. Facts, no commentary.
2. Minutes 3 to 20, the flagged deals. Two minutes each, brought by the person who flagged it, answering three things. What is stuck, what is the decision, and who needs to do what by when.
3. Minutes 20 to 28, the commitments. Every person reads their commitments back out loud. Specific and checkable, so chase Dave is not a commitment.
4. The last two minutes, the one thing everybody should know. A win, a loss, or something happening in the market. Then it ends on time, every single week.

Only deals that need something from the room make it to the table. If a deal just needs working, it does not belong there, because that is a side conversation. You bring things to the room when several heads can help solve a problem.

Three things to protect

Those commitments at the end, however, are not a formality. They are the entire point of the meeting, which is why you open the following week by checking them. Did we do them? If not, what got in the way? Skip that check and within a fortnight everybody works out the commitments were theatre, so they stop meaning anything and the system breaks down.

In an earlier episode I talked about what it really means to call a deal straight, and the language of how confident you are that something will land. This meeting is where that language gets used out loud, in front of the team, every week. It is not there to catch anybody out. It is there because a forecast you have said out loud to your peers is a truer forecast than one typed into a box on your own, and because now everybody knows what to expect.

The first three weeks will feel too short

When you go from an hour down to thirty minutes, expect about three weeks of it feeling wrong. Do not panic. If it ends in thirty minutes then it is fine, and that is not the format failing. Instead, it is everybody finding out how much of the old hour was filler. Then, if you still want the hour, you have got half of it back to use on something with a better return.

March in on Monday announcing that everything is changing and you will get resistance. That resistance is never really about the meetings, though. It is that somebody who rather liked the old comfortable arrangement can already see the new one is going to expose them, and it is the exposure people are afraid of rather than the format.

So try this order instead. Start with the daily ten minutes, because it is new and interesting and the team will judge it on what actually gets solved. It is small, people feel the benefit inside a fortnight, and it is good fun.

Next, split the one to one away from the deal review. Your better people will welcome that one, because now they are talking about themselves and their own development rather than churning through pipeline.

Finally, change the weekly sales meeting last, once the other two are running and everybody is comfortable, because by then a lot of what used to fill that hour has already found a home somewhere else.

And tell them why. Not that you are trying something new, but that the Monday meeting is costing the team 368 selling hours a year and you want to know exactly what you are buying with it. Salespeople respect that argument, because it is the same one they make about their own time every day.

1. Meetings in the diary are not a rhythm. A rhythm means each meeting has a different job at a frequency that matches it, and everybody knows which kind of meeting they are in.
2. If the same conversation could happen in three meetings, that is repetition. And repetition feels like thoroughness while producing nothing, which is exactly why it survives so long.
3. There are four clocks. Daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly, at different speeds for different questions. The weekly clock has two hands, because the team meeting and the one to one are not the same thing.
4. Every meeting does one of four jobs. Inform, decide, coach or commit. Write one of those next to every recurring meeting you have, and cancel anything you cannot label.
5. Never coach and commit in the same room. Coaching needs somebody to admit what they cannot do, while commitment needs them to stand up and state what they can. Ask for both and you will only ever get the second.
6. The weekly sales meeting is for deals that need a decision. Not all of them and not all of the time, because going round the table one by one is an inform job and that information is already in your CRM.
7. Commitments only work if you check them. Open the next meeting with last week’s. Miss that twice and the whole team downgrades them to theatre.