How to run a revenue team meeting (+example agendas)

Even in the midst of a pandemic, IMPACT partner Marcus Sheridan is out there preaching about the benefits of sales and marketing alignment. 

At INBOUND 2020, Marcus said that you need to: "Make your sales team part of your content team.” This is something we’ve been passionate about for a while at IMPACT. We believe that sales and marketing alignment is crucial to increasing qualified leads, sales, retention, and revenue. 

In fact, it’s that very sentiment is at the core of what we call a revenue team. A revenue team amalgamates key sales and marketing players within a company into one team that is centered around the shared goal of increasing company revenue, though the implementation of a content strategy. 

But, how do you actually successfully run a revenue team meeting?

In this blog, I’ll go into the nitty gritty. 

How to run a successful revenue team meeting

The first part of running a successful revenue team meeting is to ensure that it is set up correctly. This requires consideration of some necessary steps:

• Understand exactly what a revenue team is

• Ensure the right cross-section of people are involved in the revenue team

• Decide how often the revenue team will meet

• Set the revenue team meeting agenda

• Have a revenue team meeting facilitator
• Ensure there is a way to communicate outside of the revenue team meeting 

Following these steps will help to build an effective and successful revenue team meeting that will help increase leads, sales, and overall revenue for your organization. 

Step 1: Understand exactly what a revenue team is

If you're brand new to revenue teams, then I’d suggest you head over and read this blog that our Editorial Director Liz Moorehead authored (with a little help from me). 

It’s all about revenue teams: what they are, why they are important, and who should be in the team and how the revenue team actually works, but let’s just run through a quick recap.

Sales and marketing alignment is the pinnacle for most businesses. It’s the key to success. Those organizations managing to achieve alignment can increase sales by 67%, revenue by 209%, and have 36% higher customer retention rates.

It’s all well and good knowing this, but the reality of implementing sales and marketing alignment is much harder. 

And that’s where the revenue team comes in. As Liz states: 

“A revenue team meets weekly and is made of key players from your sales and marketing teams within a company. All activities, regardless of individual roles, will be centered around the shared goal of increasing company revenue. Based on the most pressing questions of their ideal buyers, this team will develop and execute a strategy of content to be used in the sales process that will increase close rates”

Ultimately it’s a team that is focused on increasing the sales and revenue of an organization. 

But one important thing to remember is that a revenue team meeting is whatever you need it to be. It fulfills whatever function is most important to the success of your business.  As a business leader you need to understand what objectives and challenges your business is facing, and how you can utilize a revenue team meeting to overcome these.

Examples of these challenges may include: 

• Departmental silos and a lack of sales and marketing alignment
• Trouble integrating content into the sales process
• A lack of sales-driven content ideas
• Current content is not driving leads and sales
• Sales team not ‘bought in’ to assisting the marketing department

Understanding the purpose of the revenue meeting ensures a clear understanding of the team’s goals and objectives and allows for leadership to clearly and concisely convey these to the rest of the team. Knowing what the purpose is, and why this will impact the organization is integral to knowing what each meeting is working towards. 

🔎 Related content: What is a revenue team (definition + video)

Step 2: Ensure you have the right cross-section of people in your revenue team

This is another thing Liz covers in detail in her article, so I won’t go into it in too much detail, but, I will say that ensuring that you have the right people in your team is a crucial step in ensuring the success of your revenue team. This will enable your goals, whatever they are, to successfully be achieved. 

Typically, a revenue team is made of key players from your sales and marketing teams within a company centered around their current shared goal of increasing revenue through traffic, leads, and sales. (i.e. a head of content, demand generation, sales, marketing in general.)

“Yes, some people in the team will be more focussed on marketing efforts (e.g. creating content) or sales efforts (e.g. closing deals). But the team acts as one, identifying and working towards their common goal."

It’s worth noting that you don’t always have to have the same people in the revenue team meetings. Who is involved will likely be dictated by what challenges you need to overcome, and what revenue team agenda you are running.

🔎 Related content: What is a revenue team (definition + video)

Step 3: Decide how often your revenue team will meet

Frequency will depend on your particular business and what makes sense for you and the timeline for achieving your goals. 

For some small organizations, bi-weekly or monthly will be enough. Larger organizations, however, may require weekly meetings, and as mentioned above, these don’t all have to involve the same challenge, or the same team members.

A SaaS company I work with, for example, facilitates revenue team meetings on a monthly cadence where they have in-depth discussions about how to use content in the sales process and share examples of what’s working and what’s not. They compliment this monthly meeting with 1) a weekly asynchronous video update from the marketing department, and 2) a monthly ROI newsletter. 

Several other companies I work with host their revenue teams on a weekly basis and facilitate discussions between the sales and marketing departments to ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same objective. 

Determining your frequency will once again help guide just how much has to be accomplished in a single meeting. 

Step 4: Have a revenue team meeting facilitator

Your revenue team is sort of like The Avengers. Individually, your team members all have superpowers, they are all worthy of their own individual movie franchise, but sometimes individuals are just not enough to beat the baddie — or in this case, enough to reach your ambitious sales and marketing goals. 

The revenue team amalgamates individuals from across the business, each with their own superpower, but the problem is, that they’ve never worked together. So, how do you help them glue together, and align to achieve a common goal?

Like The Avengers, a revenue team needs a de facto leader, a Captain America or Iron Man if you will. Someone, who is not necessarily in charge, but who will guide and facilitate the meeting to ensure that it stays on track and achieves the purpose that it was set out to. 

All successful revenue teams have a facilitator. This is usually someone in the marketing team, however I’ve seen it be a Sales VP. The facilitator should be assertive, trusted, and understand the core principles behind a revenue team and why it is so important. It it their job to:

• Allow the room to open up and share thoughts and feelings 
• Ask lots of questions to facilitate and guide the discussion
• Open up the forum for discussion inside and outside the meeting

A facilitator is key to ensuring that the revenue team stays on track and achieves what it sets out to. They hold everyone accountable. Without a facilitator, it is likely that the revenue meeting will be less focused, will waver off topic, and will ultimately not have as successful an outcome.

Step 5: Ensure there is a way to communicate outside the revenue team

Communicating with the wider team outside of these meetings means that everyone is on the same page, and knows what has been published and what is coming up. 

It can also serve as a pre-meeting update, so that everyone is up-to-date before the meeting, and you can discuss any challenges or queries in an open forum throughout the meeting. 

Revenue team meetings are essential in order to work through problems, and ensure specific objectives are met, but the collaboration doesn’t disband when the meeting does. 

Communication outside of the meeting is especially important if your actual team meetings are less frequent. It keeps up momentum and ensures everyone feels cohesive and is moving as a team towards a common goal. 

Step 6: Set your revenue team agenda

Once you know what a revenue team meeting is, who it will involve, and how often you are going to meet, you need to finalize what agenda your team meetings will follow. 

Why do you need a revenue meeting agenda?

An agenda is a way to implement formalities around the revenue team. It helps you determine who will be there, what they will tackle, and ultimately will lead to a more successful meeting, and a higher performing team. 

What format should your revenue team agenda follow?

There is really no such thing as a typical revenue meeting agenda. In fact, that’s kind of what makes it so special and effective. 

A revenue team meeting is whatever you need it to be and you don’t need to stick to just one agenda. You might find that multiple have a place in your business or that it evolves as the revenue team meetings progress. Below are a couple of sample meeting types. We’ve seen these used successfully to run a revenue team:

• Content brainstorming revenue meeting agenda

• Sales challenge revenue meeting agenda

• Assignment selling revenue meeting agenda

• Watch party revenue meeting agenda

• Huddle revenue meeting agenda

Content brainstorming revenue meeting agenda

The revenue team usually starts off with a content brainstorming agenda. This session should inform the written and video content you create, as part of your content strategy.

Outcome: Obtain sales focused content ideas directly from the sales team

Each salesperson comes prepared to discuss questions and objections from our current buyers and provide the marketing department with content ideas that will help to drive sales for the organization. 

Example questions include: 

• What’s a common objection you have been dealing with this past week or so? 
• What deals have we lost? Why do you think that is? 
• What questions do you get asked that immediately indicate the buyer is not close to ready to make a decision?
• What do your clients and buyers push back on the most?
• What are your buyer's biggest doubts or worries (with respect to the product, the process, the company)?
• What do your buyers have to convince the key decision-makers of?

At IMPACT, our brainstorming includes Liz, our revenue and features editor, John,  and the entire sales team and the agenda usually involves a member of the marketing team, asking questions that aim to extract content topics around the buying journey. For example:

• What are the objections to buying? 
• Where is the friction coming from in the buying process?

This is key to understanding the buying process from the sales perspective and allows content to be created that can help shorten the sales cycles, and close leads more quickly. Both things that are essential to increasing revenue. 

Liz created this sales content sandbox tool to help facilitate brainstorming sessions that you're welcome to use. 

 

 

Here’s how it works:

First, suggestions are entered with the following information — the topic phrased as a question in the words of the buyer; whether or not they want it as a blog article, a video, or both; who is making the request from sales; their ideal subject matter expert to address the topic; and why the topic is being requested.

Next, sales team members can denote priority by “upvoting” topics, and the spreadsheet will automatically sort the topics with the highest votes to the top!

Also, as appropriate, the color of the rows will be updated based on the status column. Again, it makes it easy visually for people to understand where everything stands without a lot of hands-on work.

The key with this tool is that it’s not just used during the brainstorm itself. We developed the tool so sales team members could communicate revenue team content priorities in real-time, as ideas came up.

They also are encouraged once a month to put in three to four new topics, and to always be checking back to upvote suggestions from their sales team peers!

However, once you have carried out this brainstorming agenda a couple of times and developed a content plan, you may find that it is no longer necessary for it to be part of the regular revenue team agenda. 

It is more likely to be something that is done occasionally in the revenue team, while the majority of brainstorming takes place with a very specific team of people (i.e. you will interview the top content subject matters in order to get information for a specific campaign.

In essence, brainstorming becomes its own independent forum. 

It’s worth noting that ideas are not exclusively for the brainstorming session. They may manifest in other revenue team meeting agendas too.  

Sales challenge revenue meeting agenda

Traditionally, one of the main challenges with content is that the marketing team isn't necessarily creating the content that the sales team needs to close deals. In fact, 23% of sales people say they need “better quality leads” from the marketing team. 

This disconnect can occur, as the marketing team who is creating the content, is not in regular contact with potential customers. They don’t know the questions that are being continually asked, or where the friction exists like the sales team do. 

Marketing might be creating great content, b. But if that content is not attracting the right customer, and solving a real problem for prospects, then it is likely that the sales team won’t use it. 

Using the revenue team is a great way to solve this challenge. This agenda can be used to address a particular sales challenge, with the aim of creating a content plan focussed around this challenge. 

This, again, will ensure that focused content is being created to tackle particular sales challenges that the team are having, which will help the sales team to overcome objections, shorten the buyer cycle and ultimately sell more which will make everybody happy.

Outcome: Overcome a sales challenge, by generating content ideas around that problem

This type of revenue team meeting agenda can be sparked off by a question such as: “What's the biggest sales challenge you are having at the moment?” This opens discussion around the biggest objections the sales team are facing, and allows a focused content plan to be created. 

With this type of agenda, you want to ensure you are always driving to a natural conclusion, and explicitly ensuring that the content created is useful. You can enable this through asking questions such as:

• If the marketing team creates this content, how will it solve your problem?
• Is it clear and obvious where this content can be used in the sales process?
• Is it clear who the content is for and how you can actually use them?

This collaborative approach to content creation allows sales and marketing alignment on the content plan. Ultimately leading to more sales, and a more successful revenue team.

Assignment selling revenue meeting agenda

Content marketing can be an amazing tool, leading to an increase in leads, sales, and revenue, but for many, the six to nine months (or longer) that it can take to see results from organic traffic is just too long. Luckily, there is a way to get your content working straight away – by putting it in the hands of sales staff.

You might have heard this referred to as assignment selling. First, described by IMPACT partner Marcus Sheridan in his book They Ask, You Answer, assignment selling is the process of using the educational content to resolve questions that your sales prospects may have ahead of the sales appointments. Marcus discovered that assignment selling could increase closing rates from 20% to 80% if utilized correctly.

The problem is, without a clear path of communication, or a revenue team meeting, it can be difficult to keep your sales team up to date on what content is being created, and develop a plan around how this can be used to push leads along the sales process. 

This is another potential agenda for your revenue meeting (and one of the most popular). It will allow you to ensure that every piece of content created can be used somewhere within the sales process.

Outcome: Ensure the sales team knows where in the sales process each piece of content created can be used.

1. Sales team to showcase examples of where they have used content in the sales process this past week and any results/outcomes
2. Marketing dept. to showcase what content has been produced this past week and open up the floor for discussion on who that content is for and how it will be used in the sales process by the sales team
3. Sales team have clear accountability for using new content in the sales process (For example: Craig will use the latest article to follow up with 8 prospects today and let everyone know how that goes next time we meet)
4. Sales team to share what’s working and what’s not across the team so the team can learn from each other - content performance, subject lines, email structure, follow up cadence, value proposition, etc. 

There are a couple of ways to facilitate this agenda in a revenue team meeting, but this is one cool way that I’ve recently seen it used. 

Recently an IMPACT client of mine, published a podcast that answered a customer's questions and sent it to the sales team, but they soon realized that it was not being used effectively within the sales process.  

Why?

Because there had been no discussion around who the content was for and how it could be used. With this in mind, the client used their revenue team meeting to dig into this particular podcast and discuss who within the current sales pipeline would benefit from it.  With this agenda, the sales team will be educated on:

• What type published content is for
• What the published content is about
• Who within the current sales process would benefit from this content
• How will you pitch it to them in terms of value proposition

🔍 Related content: Making a sales call in the age of assignment selling

Watch party revenue team agenda

This agenda is very similar to the one above. The core focus is on getting the sales team to understand how the content created can be used within the sales process. However, in this case, the time in the revenue meeting is actually used to watch the video content.

This is one of my favorite agendas that came from another IMPACT client of mine. They recently invested a ton of money into producing, top quality sales videos, but the challenge became how they were going to maximize the impact of this content. 

They decided that they needed to get the sales team not only aware of the content, but excited about it. They needed to put it in their hands to utilize throughout the buying process. So, instead of sending the video out to the sales team and hoping that they watched and used it in the sales process, they used the revenue team meeting, and spent 20-30 minutes watching each together as a team live on Zoom. 

Outcome: Ensure the sales team has seen the newest content, and knows exactly which prospects the content would help move along the sales process. 

Before playing the video, the marketing manager asked them to think about:

• What they loved about the videos
• What specific contacts they were currently in touch with that could benefit from there videos 

After they’ve watched the video there was time for a discussion, as well as some Q&A. 

The aim for this type of agenda is for the sales team to leave with specific customers in mind who would benefit from this video. 

Questions you can use here: 

• What prospects are you working with right now that you feel need to watch this video? 
• How would you pitch the video to your prospects? Why should they watch it?
• What is an obvious place in the sales process to make use of this video? 

Huddle revenue meeting agenda

This is a more general meeting agenda for the revenue team and involves everyone in the team getting time to state what they are working on, what they are stuck on, and what they are concerned about. 

One of the major problems I have seen, which is especially true in larger organizations where there are many people in both the sales and marketing departments, is when marketing campaigns are being built out, but the sales team really don’t know anything about it. I’m sure you’ve been in the situation before when the first time you know about an offer or promotional campaign is when the prospective client makes an enquiry about it. 

This revenue team agenda is created to reduce these problems from occurring. 

Outcome: Make sure all team members are aware and have the opportunity to shape the campaigns that are being developed in the marketing department.

The marketing team has the opportunity to showcase current and prospective marketing campaigns, and the sales team can ask questions and provide guidance and advice to avoid errors like current prospects getting the wrong offers, or creating any confusion with our buyers. 

The sales team can also help the marketing department to create new offers by identifying opportunities based on what they are learning from working directly with buyers.

What we are trying to avoid here is campaigns and offers being developed in a marketing silo, and to make sure the sales team gets the opportunity to shape the campaigns and understand what to expect when they are launched. 

For larger organizations such as IMPACT, sales and marketing team alignment is crucial to success. The sales team needs to know what the marketing team is working on and vice versa. This is where the huddle revenue meeting agenda can come into play. 

There are so many moving pieces within the sales and marketing teams, and this agenda gives the opportunity to ensure the two teams are aligned in terms of campaign production, and ultimately a more successful revenue team.

Mistakes companies make when running their revenue team

So, that gives you a couple of ideas for how a revenue team meeting can evolve, and what the agenda might look like. 

But now for what not to do...

The biggest mistake that I see revenue teams making is using it as a platform for sales or marketing meetings or updates.  This is not what a revenue team should be used for.  If you find that the majority of the revenue team is spent with one person speaking or presenting, then then that is not a revenue team meeting. 

It is not a time for sales projections, discussions about the pipeline, or marketing campaigns. It is a collaborative meeting between multiple members of the sales and marketing teams, and should be used to achieve the goals set out in the specific agendas - whatever they may be. 

We’ve recently created an article looking at the mistakes organizations commonly make with a revenue team, where you can read more about this.

Are you ready to run your revenue team?

Ultimately there are a number of steps that need to be taken before, during, and after a revenue team meeting to ensure that it is set up, and runs effectively, but considering these things will lead to a more successful revenue team. 

Whatever challenge your revenue team is facing, whatever function you need fulfilled, the job of the revenue team meeting is to bring the sales and marketing teams together to form a collaborative space in which to solve problems, maximize the impact of content, and ultimately increase sales and revenue.