Brainstorm with Your Team

When business is slow, schedule time with your team to brainstorm ideas.

Scheduling a brainstorming meeting will help you carve time out with your team to come up with new ideas. Everyone is busy when business is booming and innovation takes a back seat. When, business is slow, the sales team will have time to relax and think.

The aim of the brainstorming activity should be to share ideas and observations about how the sales team were able to make inroads with customers over the year, which customers they were not able to crack, what obstacles they faced, what strategies were employed (or not), what could be done for process efficiency and many other things you can think of.

Team members should be encouraged to think creatively. Ideas should be welcome openly and even if they are off tangent, immediate reactions to them should be delayed. If the team members notice that ideas are being shot down, the tendency will automatically be to filter the ideas shared and therefore many good ideas may not see the light of day.

It may benefit though to keep a theme to brainstorming ideas. Themes could center around improving cold call efficiency, improving customer visit ratio, targeting a certain customer base, and any other thing you can think of. This would help focus the matters discussed in the meeting and team members may come up with specific ideas that they have on those specific topics.

When ideas are shared and compiled, take each idea and open it up for discussion on why it would work and why it would not work. Discuss the resources required to make the idea work. Create a consensus among the team so they know why an idea can be taken forward and the work that would be required to make it a reality. This would make them owners of the idea and their subsequent actions would be centered around making that idea work.

At the end of the meeting agree on the points discussed and agreed, actions required and timelines for those actions. Circulate the actions post meeting to the team members so everyone has a record of what was discussed. Also make sure that the points are brought up in subsequent meetings to understand how the ideas are working out and progress being made on the ideas.

The overall effect of this will be that the team will feel more involved in the processes of the department as well as the company, they will take more ownership of the actions that were agreed upon through consensus, team members will learn how different actions impact business and learn analytical skills required and you will have a team that is better able to manage the company’s affairs as they will develop an understanding of how they need to operate.