5 Sales Team Meetings You Should Be Having (+ Sales Meeting Agenda Templates)

Alex Dzhurasenko 20 Jun 2023

Thanks to Hollywood, our traditional image of a salesperson is this “work hard, play hard” lone wolf, who singlehandedly wins a million-dollar deal and saves the day.

In reality, however, sales operations require a lot of teamwork behind the scenes. Especially now, as many teams are dispersed across multiple time zones and continents, communication and collaboration within your sales team are more crucial than ever.

Working remotely since day one, we at Reply have had our share of challenges with that. Which led us to adopt a bunch of practices and tools for remote sales reps.

Yet in some cases, work chats and collaboration features in your sales tools simply won’t cut it. A good old video call can make a difference, be it a one-on-one meeting or a team session. In this post, I’d like to share some of the essential sales team meetings here at Reply, along with our agenda templates you can copy.

5 essential sales meetings for an effective team

I’m not a big fan of lengthy discussions and meetings which could have been an email. But sometimes having regular check-ins with the rest of the team (or with each one of its members as a manager) is vital to your productivity and quota attainment.

Over the years, we’ve tried to eliminate unnecessary calls and make the most out of each sales meeting we’re having. Let’s talk about the top 5 regular sales team meetings you should have and what to discuss during them.

SDR Leadership Masterclass: How to coach, motivate and challenge your team [Reply & Gong]

Watch on-demand

Daily SDR standup

First off, I’d like to start with our daily standup with the SDR team. This is typically a short (up to 15 minutes) sync call to kick off a productive day of prospecting.

This is a dedicated meeting with the SDRs (for inbound and outbound reps separately) as it’s a pretty dynamic job with a lot of daily activities and challenges that should be addressed asap. But most importantly, it’s just nice to feel a part of the team when you’re building your lists, writing templates, or fine-tuning your sequences day in and day out.

Timing/frequency: daily (Monday – Friday), morning hours

Duration: 15 minutes

Agenda:

✅ General announcements and urgent updates (if any).

✅ Weekly goal attainment progress: What’s the action plan for today and how is it connected to your OKRs?

✅ Share 1 best call you booked yesterday and comment on why you were able to schedule that call.

✅ Ideas/suggestions on how to improve the process (if any).

Weekly team meeting

This is where it gets a bit tricky. As any other leader, you have a limited amount of time on your hands, but you should also understand how important it is to keep your whole team in sync.

So if your sales team has a more complex structure with a dedicated SDR role, I’d recommend having two separate meetings every week – one with the whole team and a separate one for sales reps only.

The general sales meeting will focus on more general updates and challenges your team might be facing and provide time to seek advice from other team members. The key goal of this meeting is to align your whole team on your processes/goals.

As for the weekly SDR team meeting, this could be a bit more specific with regular reports and OKR reviews for each team member as well as action plans for the upcoming week. A more detailed agenda for such a sales meeting is below.

Timing/frequency: weekly (Friday), evening hours

Duration: 45 minutes

Agenda:

✅ A quick recap of the week

✅ Company/team announcements (if any)

- - changes in the tech stack
  - changes in workflows and rules of engagement
  - company announcements
  - product updates

✅ OKRs review of each SDR

✅ What have they achieved this week?

✅ What are their plans for the next week?

✅ How do their actions align with the OKRs?

✅ Questions/suggestions (if any)

- - workflow or process issues
  - objection handling
  - anything else

✅ Non-work stuff

Bonus: Sales team training sessions

Once every few weeks, you should also hold dedicated sales training sessions on competitors/objections/difficult cases.

For example, we hold recurring SDR level-up meetings every two weeks, usually 30 minutes long, where we discuss one issue, idea, or best practice to learn something new or share experience. The topic is usually announced in advance so the team can prepare their questions in advance.

You can have the team leader speak every time or take turns so each one of the members gets to explore one of the topics in-depth and share the takeaways with the rest of the team. Here’s an example of the agenda for this type of meeting.

Timing/frequency: bi-weekly (Wednesday or Thursday), evening hours

Duration: 30-45 minutes

Agenda:

✅ Topic presentation (overview, best practices, examples, etc.)

✅ Recommended resources on the topic for further reading

✅ Q&A (5-15 mins)

Be sure to save the training recording and share it in the team chat or upload it to the dedicated folder in your knowledgebase.

Weekly 1:1 pipeline review call (AEs)

As for the AE part of your team, it doesn’t make much sense to check in every day. This part of the sales process just isn’t as dynamic as prospecting and outreach. However, having weekly one-on-one calls with every AE can help stay on top of their progress and the status of their accounts.

For a leader, this weekly sales meeting would be a great way to review the pipeline while the team members could use this chance to voice any issues or challenges they might be facing and get assistance from management ASAP. Here’s a sample sales meeting agenda you can adopt.

Timing/frequency: weekly (Tuesday-Thursday), morning hours

Duration: 30 minutes

Agenda:

✅ Personal check-in

✅ Accounts review:

- - closed the prior week
  - open deals (discovery and validation stages)
  - lost deals

✅ Current risks/challenges

✅ Personal goals for the upcoming week

Monthly pipeline review

Aside from the weekly sync calls, you should also check in with the team regarding your pipeline and OKRs once every month.

To see the bigger picture, it’s also great if you can get the product (for SaaS businesses) and marketing teams to join this meeting. Shared feedback – on closed won/lost deals, new use cases, insights about industries or team size – could be exceptionally valuable in terms of the product roadmap and marketing strategies.

Timing/frequency: monthly (every first Tuesday or Wednesday), afternoon

Duration: 60 minutes

Agenda:

✅ Top 3 opportunities

✅ Top 3 deals closed

✅ Top 3 lost opportunities

✅ Top 10 churned customers

Quarterly 1:1 SDR performance review

When it comes to one-on-one calls with the SDRs, having those every week or even month might be excessive considering the daily check-ins and weekly meetings. As a result, we’ve decided to have personal performance review calls once every quarter.

This is a great opportunity to take a look back at the previous 3 months and celebrate their wins or address any concerns. To make this meeting actionable, you can also make an action plan for the next quarter (be it related to the SDR’s quota or any other personal goals).

Timing/frequency: quarterly (every first Tuesday or Wednesday), afternoon

Duration: 45 minutes

Agenda:

✅ Non-work stuff

✅ Sharing feedback from colleagues

✅ Analyzing the past quarter

- - What were the highlights of your past quarter? Celebrate wins
  - What did not go well last quarter?

✅ Making plans for the next 3 months

- - What are your goals for the upcoming quarter?
  - What steps will you take to attain these goals?
  - What would make the next 90 days successful for you at work?
  - What kind of support do you need to achieve your goals?
  - How will you measure or track your progress on these goals?
  - Do you understand how your personal goals align with team goals?

✅ Action items that will be followed during the next quarter to drive future performance.

SDR Leadership Masterclass: How to coach, motivate and challenge your team [Reply & Gong]

Watch on-demand

Best practices for effective sales team meetings

These are the top 5 most useful sales meetings to have with your team. They help you create a healthy routine for your team to make some time for introspection and self-improvement by getting a new perspective from peers as well as the leader.

But there’s more to an effective call than the timing or agenda. Not all meetings are equally effective and a valuable part of your sales team operations. Here are some of the pro tips and best practices to get the most out of each call.

Keep all meetings shorter than 1 hour (if possible). I feel like no person has the attention span (or time) to handle this kind of call. By minute 40 most of us will be reaching for the smartphone or staring at ourselves in that small window.

Book the timeslots for every recurring meeting by creating events in the calendar. This will bring transparency and make it more convenient for your team to plan their days accordingly. Needless to say that it also makes it harder for your team members to miss a call.

Both team and one-on-one calls are equally important. Sometimes, getting face to face with your teammates for just 15 minutes is more effective than a few hour-long team calls. On the other hand, one-on-one meetings are really time-consuming. So it’s best to find a healthy balance.

Optimize the agenda as needed. If you see that you need more time or there’s a recurring issue that you keep bringing up on the call, try including it next time. If you feel like some of the questions aren’t necessary, adjust your agenda accordingly as well.

Document the action items and takeaways after each call. You can have a dedicated document for the meeting notes or share them right in your team chat. There are also amazing AI-powered tools that transcribe the calls and highlight the takeaways for you.

On a final note, there’s one more suggestion from me: Make sure to plan informal team meetings every once in a while (virtual or in-person) for team building. The feeling of isolation in remote workspaces is no joke. And those 5 minutes of casual chitter-chatter at the beginning of every meeting just won’t cut it.

Having some sort of team building to establish personal connections with your co-workers is essential to your team’s productivity and can help with personal well-being in the long run.