Instead, the sales meeting occurs weekly or bi-weekly where the sales team discusses recent activity and how the producers are progressing toward their annual goals. This meeting should include all producers, the person in charge of all sales (agency principal, managing director, sales manager), the head of marketing and the office operations manager who oversees account managers and customer service representatives.

Whether you are a sales manager for a group of producers or your own sales manager, seven basic steps make a great sales meeting:

1. Celebrations: Ask the producers to name any new business and major renewals they put to bed since the last meeting. Give a “Reader's Digest” version of what happened and what made it a success. Recognition is huge.
2. Marketing: He or she needs to address insurer issues, new markets, new market appetites, lessons learned from recent submissions, lessons learned from recent accounts written (new and renewal) as well as areas where competitive advantages can be gained.
3. Office operations manager: This person should discuss staffing issues, new hires, open positions, producer behavior issues (good and bad), systems issues, etc.
4. New business activity: The leader of the meeting should know how many new business appointments the producers have had since the previous meeting—both first-time appointments and follow-up new business appointments. Client meetings do not count.There is an easy way to do this. When producers make a first-time new business appointment, it should be entered in ALL CAPS on their calendars For new business activity, it is important to measure activity, not just dollars booked. Activity is the precursor of success or failure in meeting goals. Measure what is important. Then, depending on the number of producers in attendance and the number of appointments for the reporting period, each producer should discuss their most successful appointment and what made it so and their most unsuccessful appointment and what caused that result.
5. Sales training. Discuss the things that make the producers better sales professionals. This can be anything from cold call scripting, time management, first appointment protocols or how to identify prospects. The point is it should make them better at their jobs.
6. Technical training. A coverage issue should be discussed. It could be through a claims scenario or a new coverage interpretation. It could just be a clarification of a risk management issue, such as what are the advantages/disadvantages of an insured carrying UM/UIM coverage on their auto policy.
7. Motivational. There are myriad videos and ideas available on YouTube.

At the end of the meeting, you should have accomplished three things. The producers should be:

• Smarter than they were before the meeting (technical training)
• More professional than they were before the meeting (sales training)
• More motivated than they were before the meeting.

If you accomplish these three things, whether there were 10 attendees or just you, then you just had a successful sales meeting.

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