A few weeks ago, I broke down the weekly sales meeting for prospecting teams. But weekly sales meetings for closing teams are very, very different. The closing team’s meetings are on Fridays instead of Mondays, they’re run by the closers themselves rather than the sales manager, and they’re focused on pipeline and opportunity flow rather than sales activity level.
How we run our weekly pipeline meeting
Every Friday afternoon at InsightSquared, the closing team gathers for their weekly pipeline review meeting. They use this time for each individual closer to talk about their pipeline movement so everyone on the sales team is in the loop and can offer useful feedback.
During these meetings, each closer is allotted 12 minutes to present their pipeline to the rest of the closing team – 12 minutes because we have 5 closers and we want to keep the meeting to under an hour, otherwise people will lose focus. If your team is too big to dedicate 12 minutes to each person and still keep the meeting under an hour, then split the team into 2 groups. The manager and rest of the team should be able to chime in with questions and quick feedback throughout the presentation.
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Pipeline review + goals: 12 minutes per rep
Go over what opportunities you’ve created, removed, and pushed out from your pipeline in the last week. What does your pipeline by stage look like right now? How does your pipeline look compared with what you’ve committed to in your forecast?
Next, talk about the 4 goals you want to conquer during the upcoming week. For example, you might want to finalize your talk track for how you discount, or you want to source 2 opportunities from the conference you’re going to this Tuesday.
Finally, talk about about the progress you’ve made on the long-term goals you set for the month or quarter during the quarterly review meeting. Let’s say your goal was to source more of your own deals instead of eating off the Sales Development Reps (SDRs) – how’s that been going?
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Short update from SDR Team Manager: a few minutes
At this point, the SDR team manager can come in and give the closing team some quick insight on what the SDRs did for pipeline creation this week. This way, closers have an idea of the type of opportunities that will be passed off to them soon.
Does sales coaching play a role in the team pipeline meeting?
You might be asking yourself, why wasn’t there any formal sales coaching in these meetings? The purpose of the team-wide meeting is for reps to be held accountable for their weekly activity, stay in the loop about what their teammates are doing, give and receive feedback, and get updated on the SDR team’s activities. Sales coaching happens in the one-on-one pipeline review meetings you should hold in addition to the team-wide meetings. One-on-one, you’ll coach reps individually and dig in to a detailed analysis with them.
How do you organize your weekly pipeline meeting for closers?
