Does your company hold an annual sales meeting with your reps? If so, the meeting should be the focal point of your sales and marketing planning for the year. If you don’t hold a meeting at least every other year, you are missing a huge opportunity to improve your sales results.

The sales meeting provides a broad-based opportunity for a principal to exert influence over the rep team in a number of major areas.

First, the sales meeting is an opportunity to create esprit between the manufacturer’s team and the reps. Creating a bond based on knowing each other is the first step toward getting better results.

The sales meeting consists of many individual events that each provide an opportunity to work with your reps. The social side of the meeting may be just as important as the more formal meetings.

When to Hold Your Meeting

One firm held its meeting in February because it seemed “convenient” to the owner. The problem with a February meeting was the first quarter of the year was already over by the time the company was getting new information and programs to the reps. A change in timing to October made a huge difference in the impact the meeting had on sales results.

Timing a national sales meeting to coincide with national industry events like a convention is a good way to simplify the logistics of the meeting. But, national conventions are often times when reps have many meetings and conflicts can interfere with achieving full attendance. Scheduling the meeting a few days before the convention in the same location may be a way to handle this issue.

Who Pays?

Another reason to conduct the meeting in conjunction with a convention or conference that everyone in your business attends is that people are already paying to attend and expenses can be reduced.

If the meeting requires a special trip, it is generally the responsibility of the manufacturer to cover some or all of the expense. Some companies say to the reps: “You pay to get here as your business expense. We will pay everything else.”

Who Should be Involved
in the Meeting?

The meeting offers an opportunity to expose personnel who do not normally have direct relationships with the reps to the sales team. There is no better education for a customer service manager or credit manager than to sit through the sales meeting and learn what happens in the big outside world of revenue generation.

Having all members of your management team involved with the reps is a great way to get “outsiders” like financial and credit management to learn what has to be done to create the top line. Gaining an appreciation of the world of the reps can be a tremendous benefit to the company.

At the same time, letting the reps know how valuable and important the company feels they are by having all of the management people turn out for all aspects of the meeting is further reinforcement of the bond between the “independent” manufacturers’ reps and the company.

Interdependence as a
Constant Theme

Stressing how the company and the reps are tied together should always be a part of the meeting theme. Yes, the reps are independent business people running their own companies, but management of the principal should constantly stress the fact that although independent, the reps are interdependent with the company.

Building the Reps’ Business
and Skills

Principals can benefit greatly by stressing the company’s interest in seeing the reps successfully manage and grow their businesses. Stressing the benefits of multiple-line selling can help both company personnel and reps gain from a sales meeting. When a company acknowledges the reps’ line cards and demonstrates how the company appreciates the benefits it gets from the reps’ other lines, the company demonstrates that it is in the mainstream of selling through reps.

Training is a Win-Win

There are two types of training that can and should be a part of a sales meeting.

First, product training: Depending upon the technical complexity of the company’s products, technical product training can occupy as much as 50 percent of a national sales meeting.

The training must be truly professional. This often means training the trainers before the meeting presentations. Nothing defeats the value of product training at a sales meeting more than a dull, lifeless, boring presentation by an engineer from the company. Reps are salespeople. Reps need to be sold on the value of technical knowledge. The best way to do this is to make sure that the trainers are excellent presenters who perform their job in an exciting, high-impact manner.

That is a major challenge for any company.

Second, sales training is critical as a part of any sales meeting: It is not enough to say: “Our reps are professional salespeople.” Is this true? How many of your reps have actually participated in professional sales training? Most companies would be very surprised to learn that less than 50 percent of their reps have any professional sales training under their belts.

Well-structured training using outside professional speakers and trainers can make a major impact on both short- and long-run sales results for your company.

The introduction of sales training to a company sales meeting provides a bonus for reps because the training carries over into all aspects of their business.

Learning to Work with Manufacturers is Valuable Training

Providing programs about the rep business can also benefit an individual company. By using outside speakers who are experts in the rep business a company provides a “bonus” for its reps but also stresses its demand for ever-increasing professionalism from its reps.

Whether the subject is organization of sales calls or management of the rep business, the more a company can deliver business training to the reps the more the company benefits.

Marketing Eliminates Excuses by Salespeople

Many companies miss major marketing opportunities at sales meetings. Often programs are presented as finished and stagnant rather than works in progress.

One company that understood the need to bring the marketing programs to life spent an entire day after presenting its program for back-to-school sales with three concurrent training sessions for the reps to learn and role play so that they left the sales meeting thoroughly prepared to hit the customers and get sales.

It worked!

The bottom line — the reps are your team. Treat them as family and invest in them. The results will benefit everyone.