The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Your IFM's should be the most productive and most important time spent with your sales reps every week.

For those unfamiliar with the acronym IFM, it stands for Individual Focus Meeting. What is an IFM? It's what our team at The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) calls your weekly one-on-one meetings with your salespeople (CSS loves to create an acronym for more common sales terms to keep you on your toes.)

Numerous studies support the fact that one-on-one meetings have a large impact on your team’s performance. So, if you’re struggling with IFM’s, it’s time to prioritize and improve with these three tips.

When you think about the sales meetings you attend, are you delighted or disappointed? Are you engaged or enraged? Is your time spent in the meetings worthwhile or wasted?

Sales meetings are a staple in most every sales department. Time is money to every salesperson and sales leader. It’s up to the sales leader to make sure each meeting is positive, motivating, and worthwhile. Treat your sales team like customers who want to feel like their needs have been met and that they leave the meeting enlightened and energized.

Once you have an appointment with a strong prospect, it’s time to prepare for a successful needs analysis so all the effort you spent getting the appointment isn’t wasted. You want to make sure that you have a strong and thorough needs analysis—because understanding your prospect's desired business results, challenges, and expectations is essential for developing a solution that will achieve results.

At the core of every successful workforce management practice is communication. As managers and sellers adapt to this new normal, clear communication and scheduled talk time is more important than ever before. Talk time comes in forms such as:

• Manager to seller talk time
• Manager to key customer talk time
• Seller to key and secondary customer talk time

Email is great for communicating data and confirming details, but nothing beats a conversation. Especially when the person on the other end of the line—phone or video—has a problem and needs to tap into your problem-solving expertise. Whether with your sales team, customers, or prospects, regular check-ins promote open communication and stop larger issues from festering, as well as allow for immediate feedback.

In addition to generating revenue and keeping their sales pipeline strong, sales managers are also tasked with running effective remote sales meetings. In our current work-from-home world, managers need to stay connected with sellers to conduct the following types of meetings:

• Sales meetings
• Training sessions
• One-on-one meetings (revenue development focused meetings)
• Meetings with clients

Below are some technical tips used by world-class managers to deliver a high-quality virtual experience. When the following guidelines are observed, you’ll run an effective remote sales meetings that will produce positive experiences for the entire team.

Looking to climb out of that waste-of-time-sales-meeting rut and grab everyone’s attention with your highly productive and engaging meetings? 

It is no secret that the weekly sales meeting has plummeted to the bottom of the priority list for many salespeople. In many offices, it has become a routine exchange of housekeeping issues that could have been shared over email instead. Don’t get me wrong, you need to go over housekeeping issues from time to time, but taking an entire sales staff off the streets is a costly way to cover these items on a regular basis. Take a minute and do the math. How much does a one-hour sales meeting really cost you? That number will probably frighten you into ratcheting up the quality of your weekly get-together, so let’s get started.

Here are five powerful ways to jump-start your sales meetings and bring them to a whole new level:

IMAGINE THIS: After countless attempts to connect with a prospect, your persistence has paid off. You did it! You've got the meeting on the calendar, you are feeling great! Now, you have one chance to make a great first impression, and it needs to count. Luckily, you have a few days to prepare so you can ensure the meeting runs smoothly and the prospect views you as a trusted and valued partner.

While it’s important to prepare yourself for the meeting, you also want to prepare the prospect. This is one thing that salespeople often overlook prior to a meeting. Most prospects are going to expect you to come in and tell them why they need to buy your product or service. It’s up to you to go out of your way to be sure they know you are different and you are not going to do that. Don't just prepare yourself... also prepare your prospect.

This post was originally published on SalesHacker.com.

The weekly sales meeting — you know the one. The whole crew gets together for what amounts to an hour-long discussion around menial housekeeping items or which sales rep got a little closer to nailing a sale.

Certainly it’s important information in its own right. But, it’s not worthy of eating up an hour that could be better used securing leads. The substance of the old-school sales meeting, in essence, belongs in a weekly email.