Sales meeting is very important for your sales team

Brand empowerment and brand awareness can be achieved easily with promotional products. If you have launched a brand and need to create awareness about your new range of product, you can make use of corporate gifts. Your clients, customers, retailers, suppliers or distributors are indispensable to your company. It is important to inform them about your new products and services. Make use of innovative gifting ideas to bring about this awareness.

The next step would be to use such products to retain your customers and to have repeated sale of the same product. Gifts can be customized with your company's logo embossed on it along with the company's name if it is required. Make use of some generic items if your budget is low such as calendars, pens, umbrellas, key chains and coffee mugs. Personalized pens, personalized travel mugs, and trade show giveaways may also be considered. If you wish to have a message on your gift item, it must be a legible one. The message should be specific and clear if your brand has to be recognized. Choose an appropriate one and have a proper timing to gift them. Use it to motivate your staff, increase employee retention, bring about brand awareness with the use of logo.

Consider such products as giveaways in a consumer exhibition. The best way to start creating awareness for consumer products among the masses begins there. Be a part of a conference, business seminar, exhibitions or trade shows. People are always looking to give out freebies and gift items to customers for repeated sales. This way you can attract a new customer towards your product.

Ah, the dreaded once a week sales meeting. Usually a once a week ritual in most sales oriented companies whether retail, indirect sales or direct sales its always a must have. I have never known a manager who loved to have these meetings with their staff every week. They usually saw them as ritualistic requirements imposed on them by upper management and their sales staff. If you have that attitude, then that really sucks! I'm probably one of only a few managers that really enjoyed taking these meetings on a weekly or when needed, bi-weekly basis. Maybe if you don't like taking them, you might find some helpful ideas on how to turn your weekly sales meetings into a more enjoyable experience for you but more importantly, for you sales staff.

First of all, what should be discussed at these meetings? All the obvious things for a start like sales techniques, sales processes, how you are tracking for the month as a team. Also sales planning as in how you are going to achieve your goals for the month is an important matter and lastly, miscellaneous matters that came up the week before.

Preparation is the key to a successful sales meeting. You need to know what to talk about and how you are going to present it. It's not as difficult as you think it is. Our meetings were on a Monday morning at 8am so that gave me the weekend to think about things. I just basically started off by saying what a great team it was and thanked everyone for their contribution for the past week. I outlined how we were tracking for the month, our highs and our lows and asked for suggestions on how we are going to meet our target for that week. I got them involved and you would be surprised at what ideas came out when everyone felt their input was worthwhile.

Sometimes I would ask someone from upper management to do a sort of guest speaker role and the topics were usually how the company was tracking so that it made the team feel that they were appreciated 'from above'. Once a month or so we would have our breakfast meeting at McDonalds or somewhere like that where they have a small private area and that usually went down really well. Other times we would have fresh muffins and take away coffees brought in from the deli. It made it a far more enjoyable experience for everyone. Lastly we would cover any issues anyone had that could be relevant to other staff members and left the floor open for discussion. But, I was always in charge of where the meeting was heading. If it was going off on a tangent, I'd bring it back on topic. Sometimes people would thank me for an interesting and inspiring meeting which made me feel good about it.