6 Tips For Productive Sales Meetings

Like many sales organizations, Shamrock gathers our team for an annual sales meeting to provide updates, share new ideas and build team camaraderie. For companies like ours with geographically dispersed locations, it’s even more important to bring the entire team together at one time, in one place, to create connections and allow for face-to-face conversations: These interactions are essential to our team-centered culture. 

Over the years, we’ve developed our own formula for managing engaging, productive sales meetings. We start by creating a theme for our annual sales meetings to frame content and messaging. And we bring in vendor partners as guest speakers to provide timely, insightful presentations about marketing solutions relevant to every sales rep.

While Shamrock usually opts for an offsite venue, this year we held the meeting at our corporate headquarters, which allowed sales reps to connect and integrate with the rest of our employees at the home office. More than 30 years in sales has taught us: Change is good and mixing things up helps keep the entire team energized.

If you’re preparing for your team’s meeting, consider these tips below from Entrepreneur magazine for organizing a productive sales meeting:

1.    Start with an energizer. Engage the group right from the start to set the tone for the meeting…introduce a motivational speaker, a video, or a group ice breaker.
2.    Keep it simple. As you build your agenda, ask yourself: “Does this need to be included as part of the group meeting…or is this best managed as a sidebar?”
3.    Manage individual updates. Give yourself a time allotment for updates—and stick to it.
4.    Motivate and reward. Build motivation into the team meeting by making sales reps feel supported and appreciated. Use awards—funny, team challenges, performance-based—or simple hand-written thank-you’s.
5.    Capability activity. Make sure reps walk away with new information that they can use to better manage and grow their business—whether that’s a new CRM platform or tips for bolstering social media presence.
6.    Keep to a standard agenda. By following the above steps, you’ve created your agenda: Use it to keep you focused and on track.   

Do you have unique elements or program features that are part of your annual sales meeting? We’d like to hear from you.

Honoring Powerful Women.

In 2012, Shamrock celebrated women throughout the entire month of May. Digging through our archives, we found this oldie but goodie: A blog by Bob Troop about the influence of powerful women. So, before this month comes to a close we’d like to share this post from May 2012…its message still resonates with us today.

MAY BRINGS FLOWERS, MOTHER'S DAY AND POWERFUL WOMEN. This week Bob provides some interesting facts about women in powerful places.
May, moms and flowers. Since this is the month of Mother's Day and there's an abundance of blooming flowers, these three naturally go together. As kids, we always scrounged enough money together to buy a card and flowers for mom. My kids always remember their mom on Mother's Day, and I hope this tradition continues in every household.

But today Mother's Day is different in many homes, from single moms, to two moms, to CEO moms. Many working mothers today hold powerful and significant positions in government, business and the media. While the glass ceiling may still be visible, it's filled with cracks and holes and appears to be weakening year by year.

One thing is clear as a bell: more and more, successful women in business are not forsaking motherhood for business success. For example, one astounding statistic that was brought to my attention is that 88% of women on the 2011 Forbes' List of The World's Most Powerful Women are mothers with an average of 2.5 children!

While many women aspire to have it all: Mom, Wife, CEO of Big Business, some women choose to start their own business so they can manage a career and motherhood to meet their personal needs. If their choice is to own and manage their own business, I say, "Go for it."

However, I like to think that moms who work at Shamrock can have it all! At Shamrock we value and respect the needs of all parents who may require time away from work to be with their children or other family members. But the truth is that many large corporations are not so understanding. Susan Spencer, former general manager of the Philadelphia Eagles, raised an interesting point when she was interviewed on CBS (CBS News interview with Susan Spencer). Spencer, the first woman to manage a major sports team, said, "... It's all in the numbers – women are more likely to be discriminated against, passed over for raises and just passed over even when they're not asking for flextime and a maternity leave so they can raise a family. I think women who are raising a family are better off starting their own company than working for someone else..."

ONE LAST THING... The bottom line is, each of us must decide how to balance work and family life. Regardless of whether we're moms, dads, single or married, our success comes not just from our job away from home, but from the joy and pleasure we achieve in our time away from our job.

Boost self-discipline. Here’s how.

Look in the mirror and answer yourself honestly: Do you have self-discipline? Many of us strive for things within our reach—better health, a happier life, earning more money. If you have a goal, and a plan to achieve that goal, the only thing standing in your way is…you, and the self-discipline required to execute your plan. Here’s an example:

•    Goal: Earn more money
•    Plan: Write a detailed business plan with     tasks required to achieve better results
•    Execution: Make time to work my plan every day, consistently!

Simple, right? Not so much. The execution is where we often fall short, and can be due to a lack of self-discipline: I’m too tired to go to work early. I didn’t have time to make those extra calls today.


Self-discipline requires you to focus on your purpose—what you really want. And it also requires a focused practice.  A recent Forbes article offers six strategies to help increase self-discipline:

1.    Acknowledge your weaknesses (uncomfortable making cold calls or speaking to a crowd?)
2.    Establish a clear plan
3.    Remove temptation when necessary (social media, office distractions)
4.    Practice tolerating emotional discomfort (getting past rejection)
5.    Visualize long-term rewards
6.    Recover from mistakes effectively

Does your lack of self-discipline keep you from achieving what you want in life? If so, look in the mirror and take back control, one step at a time.

Good luck,
Bob DeGarmo

LLS Cleveland Campaign Earns $584,000

What an amazing fundraising effort: 8 candidates. 10 weeks. $584,000 earned for LLS.

This past weekend at the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) 2017 Man and Woman of the Year campaign wrapped up at the annual Gala event.

Supported by my incredible team, we raised $81,477 for LLS, and in doing so, I was humbled and proud to receive Cleveland’s 2017 Man of the Year title—a distinction that I share with all of those who worked during the past 10 weeks of the competition to raise funds to find a cure for blood cancers.

I was blown away by the generosity of the NE Ohio community and beyond: People gathered in Charlotte at a neighborhood BBQ, solicited and donated auction items, and participated online to support my campaign. On behalf of leukemia survivors like my sister-in-law Katie, as well as those who are battling the disease today, thank you!

I’m pleased to have served as a voice for those whose lives have been affected by cancer—and I’ll continue to support LLS in working to make someday, today.     

Tim Connor

Use Marketing Asset Management To Drive Association Membership

In survey after survey, associations of all sizes cite building and retaining membership as their greatest challenge. So how do you attract and engage members? Assuming your association offers attractive, tangible member benefits, the next step is to promote that message through branded marketing.

Marketing asset management (MAM) is a smart solution for managing personalized, brand-driven association marketing initiatives for both your chapters and members.

Efficient program deployment. From a single online portal, MAM allows you to manage your entire marketing effort. Tradeshow banners, apparel, email campaigns: MAM displays the options available to your chapters. Each chapter can then co-brand the items with their location-specific information.

Brand control. MAM delivers the control and consistency that is vitally important to brand protection, with the ease of online ordering and fulfillment. Your association’s brand guidelines are programmed into the site, as is market-specific data, which allows you to pre-program select marketing assets available to specific chapters or regions.

Easy co-op management. MAM has built-in functionality that allows chapters to order pre-approved branded items such as gifts, or promotional items for giveaways, using co-op dollars. Substantial savings. MAM streamlines the marketing automation process by housing all marketing assets and offering personalization—all with a few clicks. The result is significant savings, both time and money.

Comprehensive. MAM automates day-to-day marketing management within one portal and can be embedded with twitter feeds and other social media links to provide an at-a-glance view of all association marketing activity, from one dashboard.

Do you use a MAM tool for your association marketing? Are you interested in learning more? I’d like to hear from you…klawlor@shamrockcompanies.net

Kathy Lawlor