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It’s Only Common Sense: That Annual Sales Meeting

Last week, I discussed preparing for 2018 by developing account plans and forecasts. I mentioned that this should be presented, viewed, and discussed by the entire management team at an annual sales meeting held in January 2018. This week, I’ll focus on this annual sales meeting.

This is truly the most important meeting your company will hold every year. It is the one time during the entire year where the team comes together and intentionally talks about business for the coming year.

Besides the salespeople presenting their slate of account plans, and their customer-by-customer month-by-month sales forecast, Operations will discuss their plans for the coming year and how, based on the sales forecast, they will plan production shifts and staff the company to meet that forecast.

Engineering will explain any new technologies that will be coming up within the next year and when they will be implemented.

Both Operations and Engineering will present a capital plan, listing expenditures for the coming year. This includes equipment and facility upgrades, and a schedule of when they will occur.

And Quality will present any new specs, qualifications and registrations that they plan to achieve or update in the coming year.

Marketing will deliver their marketing plan, including a quarter-by-quarter plan for synergistic marketing that will tie in advertising, newsletters, and social media. They will also announce the trade shows where they will be exhibiting and attending.

There will also be a download of market information, including a study of each market, from defense and aerospace to security, computers, telecom, medical and commercial, to decide which marketd to target. There will also be a discussion of the competition: Who is winning? Who is left? Who has gone out of business and why? Which companies have grown, and by doing what?

And finally, the entire team will come together and discuss the company’s strategic direction for the coming year. This will involve setting a complete plan in play for the coming year, including sales tactics based on the customers, technology, and markets that the company will be targeting not only in the next 12 months but also 24, 36, and even 60 months.

This team will study, discuss, and make major decisions on a number of key topics including whether or not to develop and implement an acquisition program for buying or merging with new companies. They may decide to develop and implement a roll-up plan where they acquire suffering companies and roll up their business into their own. Or they might decide to vertically integrate and buy an assembly company or a design service bureau so they can offer a total solution from design to assembly. Or alas, they might decide that it is time to call it day and sell the company, or worse yet, just close it…that’s ugly.

The annual sales meeting is a good time to discuss partnerships. Maybe the team decides that it is time to face facts and start offering offshore services, finally going out and getting some Asian suppliers to complement their own capabilities.

These are all issues that are discussed at this annual meeting. But the most important thing by far, is that all the company’s key people are together in one room for one, two, three days or even a week. Deciding together the direction of the company. This is the real reason for the annual meeting. And therefore, every second of that meeting must be carefully planned. There should not be a minute wasted. Everyone should participate and have their fair representation at this meeting. And yes, everyone should come fully prepared to not only discuss their area but also with their strong ideas as to the overall direction of the company.

Three things need to come out of the annual meeting:

1. Everyone must be in complete agreement as to the direction of the company once the meeting is over. Inside the meeting room, there can be infighting and chair throwing and loud words and intense arguments. But once the meeting is over, all management must come out of that room fully aligned and marching in step toward the company’s future.
2. There must be a communications plan. Once the direction of the company has been decided and everyone on the management team is marching in place, all the managers must go to their respective departments and convey these marching orders. In as little as 24 hours everyone, and I mean everyone in the company, must know chapter and verse the direction of the company.
3. And the last thing that comes out of the annual meeting is a fully assigned and dated action plan—the plan that will become a working document. The tool, the blueprint, that everyone uses to not only implement that plan but measure the company’s progress against the plan’s dated milestones. Too many companies go to all the trouble of holding an annual meeting only to throw the plan in their bottom drawers and completely forget about it until the following September, when it is time to repeat the entire process of annual planning. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is sheer foolishness.

If you are not planning to have an annual meeting this year, if you are not planning to develop account plans, and forecasts, and capital plans, and engineering plans, then why don’t you just do yourself a favor and just plan to check out now. Call my friend Tom Kastner and start the process of selling your company while you still have something to sell.

It’s only common sense.