Effective Team Conference Calls

In the age of technology and locations that are spread across the country, the telephone confence call has become a key tool in the arsenal of the sales manager.    I recently had the opportunity to help my team improve their confernce call managment skills.   Following is the text from a quick email I sent out to my team.

These are tips I have used (or try to use) when leading my calls. 

Stand Up When You are Giving Your Call

By standing up or even walking around during the call, you will come across with more energy and enthusiasm.    The content of these calls is not the most exciting information in the world, so it is up to you to bring the enthusiasm and excitement to the call.    

Your team will emulate about ½ the energy you demonstrate on the phone call.  So if you are quite and monotone I can guarantee most of your team has hit the snooze alarm and rolled back over asleep.    

Praise Publicly and Coach Privately

Always talk positively and use these calls to motivate your team to do better.   Don’t use these calls to manage the team’s performance as a group.     If you have performance issues, focus on them with each individual sales specialist.  When you bring up performance issues to the team, it tends to demoralize those people who are performing well.    Always talk about the good things that are happening in your district and leave the negative to individual calls.    Trust in the fact that they already are well aware of what they are doing wrong and don't need to be publicly reminded of it.

A better way to manage group performance, if you absolutely need to cover a topic, is to recognize the outstanding performance of a member of your team and have them comment on how they do it.  You send a message to the rest of your team that the topic is important and you also get the benefit of enhancing someone’s self esteem by giving them public recognition.   

Do Not Feed the Animals

Take issues which are volatile and likely to spark into a group “bitch fest” offline and handle them one on one.  If you are cornered into discussing a touchy subject, then talk about it briefly and offer to answer questions after the call with anyone who has concerns. End the discussion quickly and move on to the next topic.   The longer you let the discussion go on, the more likely you will lose control of the call.    If you lose control of a call, you have lost control of our team.   

Don’t bring up issues on the call that you know will cause problems.  It is better and more effective to handle group communication of potential volatile topics in email if they have to be communicated to the whole group.   Pay and hour reductions are examples of topics that should be avoided on your call and are better handled individually.    

Make the Call More about THEM and Less about YOU.

You are the boss and are an expert in the topic you are covering.  Assume they already know it and don’t spend time on the call trying to prove it to the group.

Our calls were created as a way for your team to interact and learn from each other.    They are a tool that helps the sales specialist learn from those who are doing it best.   Make sure the content and tone of your call is one that encourages group interaction.    My recommendation is that if you need to cover a piece of information to the team, get one of your best associates to cover it for you.   They can review information as well as you can, but the benefit is that they get the personal recognition as a leader in your team.     At the least, encourage interaction and get people talking instead of just listening.

In the beginning of any project, you may need to talk more because you are passing along the information to them for the first time.   Overtime, you should be doing less talking and more facilitation of the discussion. 

And always leave about 15 minutes of each call with room for a roundtable discussion.    You can provide a topic to get them started (What is the best way to greet a customer, what are the reason why our product is better than the compeitor's) or you can open up the floor to topics they would like to discuss.  Either way, give them the opportunity to interact.

Interaction; It’s a Good Thing.

Your sales specialist's phone works both ways.  Let’s make sure they are doing more than just sitting there and listening to you talk.    If you go more than 7 to 10 minutes without any interaction from your team, then you probably have a lot of people not paying attention.  Be sure to break up your stream of information download by asking for some responses from your team.   Simple questions like “Does this make sense?” or “Does anyone have anything to add to that topic?’ can go a long way to making your calls more enjoyable.   

I would also recommend calling out to those sales specialists who do not talk much on the call.   We all have people who can and will dominate the conversation of our calls but it is important that we get the interaction of everyone on the call.   One of the benefits of more participation is more people will pay attention if they know you might call on them during the call.    The other benefit is that you might get a gem of an idea out of someone who doesn’t normally speak up.   

Content of Calls Should Enhance Other Information Mediums, Not Replace Them.

If the information you are providing could be easily communicated in an email or a post on New and Information page, then why are we holding a conference call?   Our weekly Conference calls are there for you to reinforce messages and add to the topics we discuss in documents we send out.    They are not there for you to download information the sales specialist has read in other places.     If it has to be read, have one of the participants do it, but try your best to bring new information to the topic or discuss something that is entirely new.

And never forget this important point:

The goal of our calls is for our sales specialist to walk away with a new idea that will help them be more successful.

If your team doesn’t walk away with something new from each call that helps them be more successful, then there is a good chance that they might walk away from more than just your phone call.    Conference calls can get long and boring so do your best to make them interesting and educational.   We hold the calls every other week so you get a chance to spark the enthusiasm of those people who you don’t get to see each week

Have fun, interact, play some music, do what ever you can to make people look forward to the next call.    Make your call something they make sure they don’t miss rather than a source of noise in the background as they finish their laundry.

Comments

[Paul Brown]

Sales Managers have a wide variety of responsibilities in today's competitive landscape that they are faced with. This certainly makes finding the time for sales management and sales planning a challenge. In sales management we know the importance of executing sales with a sales plan. To ensure the passing of this skill to sales reps, we need to teach them to create a successful sales plan and execution strategy. Since time is limited, using sales templates and tools will help to maximize the interaction with Sales Reps to get the most measurable performance gains for the time spent.