Why Your Daily Sales Meetings Aren't Working (Ask Jeb)

0:00This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi, I'm Jeb Blunt, guest-selling author of fanatical, prospecting, objection, sales EQ and ink, and I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. Welcome back to the Sales Gravy Podcast. It's a wisdom Wednesday where you drive the agenda because on this segment of the Sales Gravy Podcast, you bring your biggest sales challenges and Jeb Blunt delivers his best answers. And those answers, they come straight from the trenches because Jeb's not just teaching sales. He's out there prospecting, closing, and leading sales teams every single day. Let's take that next caller. Welcome to another episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast. On this episode, we are with the Leadership Mastermind. And the Leadership Mastermind is on Sales Gravy University, and it is run by the fabulous Jessica Stokes, who is a sales gravy master trainer and coach.

1:01And if you'd like to learn more about our Mastermind groups, or try any new course on Sales Gravy, if you've never taken a course, go to learn.salesgravy.com, that's learn.salesgravy.com, and use the code free course to take your very first course for free. Now, this is for first-time users. I think you'll find that these masterminds are amazing, and they will help you solve your biggest problems. Now, this year, we're putting a lot of effort in our leveling up the Sales Gravy Podcast. And as always, the Sales Gravy Podcast is free, so if you could do me a favor, click the follow button wherever you get your podcast, and make sure that you give it a five-star review. All right, so we're going to get started with questions from the Leadership Mastermind, and Lou, you're going to go first. Thank you, Jeff. This is the third mastermind group I'm in. Already, the second one in the Leadership Group. Thank you very much. So I'm a Sales Manager. I have a question related to this role. As a Sales Manager, how do you effectively demonstrate empathy

2:03when you address your team members' concerns problems, and also maintain a positive attitude because you're in a leadership role? Sure, it's a great question, because if you think about your role as a coach, essentially, you're mirroring the same type of behaviors that you want your salespeople to have when they're standing in front of customers. So, for example, listening and being empathetic. And one of the toughest challenges for sales leaders when it comes to empathy is differentiating sympathy for empathy. So sympathy is agreeing with their position. In a lot of cases, you know, salespeople are whining at you. They're pushing back because you're asking them to do really hard things like go-face rejection. Impathy, on the other hand, is the ability to stand in their shoes and see things from their perspective without being attached to it. Well, in other words, you don't have to agree with them. You can see it with detachment. The lack of empathy is when you don't even take the time

3:05to try to understand where they're coming from. And the best way to demonstrate empathy as a sales leader is to make sure that you take the time to listen before you formulate what you're going to say or what you're going to coach. So, when you sit down with someone, and this is true with anyone, and we all have to practice as leaders, I know I'm absolutely guilty as a leader of not being as empathetic as I should be in some cases, but it really all comes down to listen. If I just take the time to listen to you and allow you to completely express yourself, that allows me to stand in your shoes. And even if I said, Lou, get where you're coming from because if I were in your shoes, I would feel the same way. Let's talk about how we're able to, even in this circumstance, move from here to where we need to go to where our goals or our targets or the behavior change that I need you to make in order for you to stay on my team. But for you as a leader, primarily, it's going to be listening. Now, when it comes to positive behavior,

4:05maybe let's think about prospecting for a moment. So, yesterday, I was in Florence, South Carolina doing a full day training session with a group of software sales people and we did a couple of phone blocks, fanatical prospecting phone blocks. And when you're doing those type of things, people are like, they're a little bit afraid, they're maybe a little bit trevidatious going in. You're like asking them to do something that nobody wants to do. And the tendency for us as leaders is to go, you need to do this right now, or like, we just force the issue. And the way that I approach those things to keep it positive, but to basically say, I'm not back and down, is I think of myself like Teflon, like none of the excuses, nothing that they say is going to stick. So, when they go, you know, I'm not sure this is a really good time to prospect. I go, you know what? You might be right, but we're going to do it anyway. So, I just do things like that. The best thing is you're leading with positivity. You show up with positivity, but you maintain your determination

5:05and your intention that we're still going to go through these particular activities. We're still going to run our system. We're still going to do those things. But when you're coaching it, when they're pushing back, you're doing it with a big smile on your face. Not always easy. It's really the best way. So, when people say, I don't want to do that, go, that's okay. I don't want to do it either, but we're going to do it anyway. I go, you don't have to like prospecting, but you don't have a choice. You still have to do it with a smile on your face. Does that answer your question? Yeah, thank you, Jeff. Just got one question. I'm very new in this. So, I'm still doing sales a lot. We've got one or two agents now. You're running morning meetings. I would you structure that for success so that the day would be a successful day? So, you're talking about meetings that you hold with your people in the morning before work starts. Yeah, I typically try to try and do that because I didn't have that in the past. Good. Are you just doing like a team hide all every single morning? Yeah. A lot of people call them stand-up meetings. I love them. I think they're a great thing,

6:06especially if you can pull that off as a leader. So, the first thing is they've got to be short. How long are yours? About 30 minutes? It's too long. So, they should be 10 minutes to 15 minutes no more. Because a 30-minute meeting is good if you're going to have a weekly meeting so you can go 30 to 60 minutes with a weekly meeting. But if you're going to do a daily stand-up, 30 minutes, you're just boring people to death. Because there's a lot of pontification going there. So, I always say 10 to 15 minutes on your morning meeting. If you're going to do it every single day, you have to do it every single day so you can't miss it. You either are going to do it or you're not going to do it. As soon as you get inconsistent with it, the salespeople won't trust you to do it anymore. And they'll start tuning out or they'll stop showing up or they'll find excuses not to be there. So, that would be number one. How do you structure it right now? What are you covering in your meeting? Just focus for the day, the marketing activity we're doing to get leads in and also have they built their lists to call that kind of stuff, yeah. But if you did that every single day, yeah, you have pretty boring. So, here's what you want to do with that meeting. Your salespeople daily,

7:06what is their basic daily activity? Just making calls, inbound leads, following up. So, there's a couple of things that you can do. One thing you can do is you stand up every morning and you start off with some inspirational quote. If you're doing it virtually, you can find a million videos to play. There's a bunch of them on my channel on YouTube, sales gravy. If you like tiki talk, I'm at sales gravy on tiki talk, there's a bunch of them there. So, maybe there's something you can find for 30 seconds. You play it and you go, okay, what do you all think about this? What about this? How could this impact us? You do something motivational at the beginning. If you've got people who did a good job yesterday, point it out and recognize people. Then, because most of the day they're on the telephone, one of the things you got to realize is that telephone prospecting as a whole, either inbound or outbound, those skills are perishable over time. All your people have to have as a couple of bad calls and they start changing their behaviors. What I would do is every morning, let's just say you're going to run the five-step telephone prospecting framework out of sales gravy,

8:07all right, a fanatical prospecting. So, you just roleplay that. So, you go in, you just throw it out there and you roleplay a couple of those. And I know a couple of my clients who do that every day. They have a stand-up and they roleplay the telephone prospecting cadence and then they send everybody off. The other thing you could do is every day pick an objection. So, you throw the objection out and you just roleplay through the objection. So, you're using it as an opportunity to motivate them, to teach them, to get them engaged, right? So, train them something. If you change it out a little bit every single day, people don't know exactly what to expect, but they're going to get the same basic format. It's going to be 15 minutes long. We're going to do this, this, this, and this. And of course, if you've got updates from the company, there's something that they know about. You can tell them that. But I would sandwich it that way so that they walk off and they're energized. When they hit that first call, they're like, man, I'm ready to go. Boom, that's how I would do it. I love what you're doing. I think that's really smart. A lot of leaders

9:08don't think that way. Let's get together every single morning, but uses an opportunity to teach them. Another way that you could do this, and as we conclude this podcast, this is a shameless plug, but it's coming all the way from South Africa. Imagine that if you had your people, you had a team training hub on Cells Gravy University. All your people were in their training hub. All the courses that are available to you over a thousand hours of courses are there. You could have signed out those courses during the week. Let's say you had a course on telephone prospecting or you had a course on how to start your day. There's a great course now by Jamie Lynn on how to start your day. Or what to do when you get rejected. Little micro bites, five minutes long. Imagine that you could sign that out to everybody. I say, everybody don't you watch this. And we're going to be talking about this tomorrow during our team standup. Imagine that you could do that. And that's, by the way, what so many small teams are doing, and scaling teams are doing these days, they're using their team training hubs to bring their team together around training subjects and using it as a catalyst to grow their team.

10:09If you've never taken a course on Cells Gravy, go to learn.cellsgravy.com, learn.cellsgravy.com, courtesy of hiring from South Africa. You can use the code free course and you can take any course, any course for free. Thank you all for all the questions on today's mastermind group. If you've got a question for the show, and you want to be on the Cells Gravy podcast, go to Cellsgravy.com forward slash ask. That's Cellsgravy.com forward slash ask. And remember, when you're tired and out of energy and ready to go home, always push through and make one more call. I'm Jubilant Jr., and we'll catch you next time on the Cells Gravy podcast. I'm Jubilant Jr., and we'll catch you next time on the Cells Gravy.com.