Boost Performance with Better Internal Sales Team Meetings

Internal meetings with your team—including one-on-ones, pipeline review meetings, and forecasting sessions—are some of the most powerful tools for managing your team and improving performance. 

But you have so many meetings on your calendar…what are the best ways to ensure these meetings are actually productive?

The secret is data. 

Performance data from your sales reps gives you valuable insight into how your team is doing, what they need to improve, and how you can avoid letting deals slip through the cracks.

Let’s take a closer look at how you can empower your team and enhance overall performance by using a data-driven approach to leading internal meetings.

How You Can Systematize Internal Meetings

There are a few different kinds of tools in your tech stack that you can leverage to get insights for your internal meetings. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. 

CRM reporting

Sales teams can use CRM reporting and dashboards to evaluate the performances of their teams and reps. This data is typically available immediately, but picking out the information that will be most useful for your meetings is time-consuming. 

Business intelligence

Business intelligence solutions like Tableau and Looker are flexible and powerful ways to do reporting and visualization, but they are slow to set up and time-consuming to monitor. 

Data-driven sales management software

Data-driven sales analysis software is purpose-built for improving sales team performance. Atrium falls into this category. These solutions are typically easy and fast to implement and they are monitored automatically. However, sales management software platforms vary in how flexible they are—so shop smart.

Out of the three main software types described here, data-driven sales management software is the most effective for making internal meetings more productive. Let’s take a closer look at how you can use platforms like Atrium in your one-on-ones, pipeline reviews, and forecasting meetings.

Better one-on-one meetings

If you haven’t used a data-driven approach to one-on-ones before, get in touch with your reps ahead of time and let them know that you’ll be discussing metrics at their upcoming individual meetings. To add context, tell each rep you’ll be looking at metrics like their opportunities and conversion rates, as well as talking through how prospects are moving through the funnel.

The goal of one-on-one meetings is to coach reps and help them visualize their action items. Using metrics from Atrium can help you tell a story that will be inspiring to your reps and help them close more deals. 

Merely saying something like, “You need to close more deals” to a rep that is struggling isn’t helpful—but looking at metrics will give you data on their upstream activities, so you can have better, more productive coaching conversations.

Here’s an example of what a one-on-one meeting would look like if you’re using data-driven sales management software to guide the conversation:

The manager does the prep work for the meeting by creating an agenda, building appropriate data dashboards, and then scheduling the meeting with the rep. 

Before the meeting, the manager reviews the data in the dashboard and identifies issues, then prepares questions and coaching advice for the rep, based on their individual metrics.

For instance, the manager might ask the rep, “What are you seeing in your top-of-funnel activity? Why do you think your conversion rate from the proposal stage is lower? What are you doing at the bottom-of-funnel stages that isn’t going well, and how can we improve that?”

 During the meeting, the manager discusses the issues with the rep, and together they decide on next actions. Those steps will feed into the agenda of the next one-on-one meeting, so the manager can track progress.

There needs to be a constant back-and-forth relationship between the sales rep and the manager, so you’re both clear on expectations and you can have successful one-on-one meetings every time.

Here are a few examples of the metrics you can examine in one-on-one meetings:

• Opportunities in pipeline
• Meeting on the calendar
• Accounts touched
• Win rate
• Average selling price

More productive pipeline review meetings

Pipeline review meetings address two important needs: forecasting and decision making.

During these meetings, your goal is to understand what deals are likely to close and which ones are unlikely to close, then identify any actions your sales team needs to take.

Pipeline reviews are different for enterprise and SMB reps, because team members are looking for different kinds of prospects. Here are some of the key differences in pipeline review meetings for enterprise and SMB reps:

If you’re using Atrium or another data-driven sales management platform for your pipeline review meetings, you can examine metrics like opportunity health. Opportunity health or “opp health” gives you a snapshot of all the open opportunities that are rated “poor” or “at-risk.”

An opportunity might be considered “at-risk” if there isn’t an upcoming meeting on the calendar, if the opp age is significantly longer than the team average, if you don’t have a record of your last outbound email, or if the last meeting was over a month ago. 

You can immediately pull all of these opportunities from the data and ask your rep whether these opportunities are likely to convert into sales, or if you should close them out and focus on other possibilities in the pipeline. If the deal is likely to close, you can work together to figure out next steps to move the prospect through the sales funnel.

Seeing the future in your forecasting meetings

A sales forecast is simply a prediction of future sales revenue. Using a data-driven approach to forecasting meetings helps you avoid guessing, and instead use hard facts to estimate what’s on the horizon for your team.

During your forecasting meetings, you can use a metrics inspection tree like the following to estimate upcoming bookings and win rates for reps.

Using analytics, you can show the connection between the leading and lagging indicators of quantity and quality of a rep’s selling metrics. 

When issues are spotted, Sales Ops, sales managers, and reps can get to the root cause of problems by digging down into more specific metrics for a rep. For example, you can ask “Why is this AE’s average selling price down?” or “Why is this SDR struggling with meeting creation?”

You can compare the individual to their peers, to the expected level for their role, and even to their own past performances to spot issues that are resolvable.

What to do if you're feeling overwhelmed

Data-driven sales management tools like Atrium provide a lot of powerful data that can help you improve your team’s performance—but what if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed?

Our advice is to start small by introducing a few basic metrics into your one-on-one meetings. 

Pick three metrics you can go over with the rep, and let them know in advance what you’ll be discussing. Over time, you’ll be able to iterate your approach and add more data discussions to your meetings as you get comfortable with using data dashboards. Then you can use a full range of metrics to get the full picture of what’s happening with each rep, and with your entire sales organization.

Powering up your internal meetings with Atrium

Atrium’s data-driven sales management software helps sales managers turbo-charge their internal meetings for maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

With Atrium’s automated data sync, you will have all the metrics for your AE and SDR reps right at your fingertips, without the need for tedious manual data entry.

Atrium is also easy to deploy and adopt—you can get started in under two minutes and start tracking metrics that will lead to better meetings, better coaching conversations, and better results.

When you take a data-driven approach to leading your one-on-ones, pipeline reviews, and forecasting sessions, you’ll stop dreading meetings and look forward to leading with confidence.

Sign up for Atrium for free today to get started.

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