If you work in sales like I do, then you’re probably as fortunate as I am to experience “sales meetings” and the accompanying “sales huddles”. In the world of commissioned sales, there’s never a reason to work only 40 hours a week. My manager is a genius when it comes to ensuring that we start our work days as early as humanly possible, and ending them well after you mere mortals would typically end your work day.
Up until a year ago, we had a weekly sales conference call on Monday mornings at 7am, hosted by our ever so gracious Regional Sales Manager. The calls didn’t really focus on sales, but played out as a roll call / cheerleading session where each branch in the company would scream into the telephone to prove that they were the most awake. For about the last 30 minutes or so, the regional dude would talk about market numbers that made little or no sense to our feeble minds, then sent us on our way.
About 6 months ago, we were graced with the arrival of a second weekly call, this one on Friday. The Friday call reviews the numbers that were issued on Monday, and gives each branch another opportunity to out-scream the others.
And now in an effort to impress his supervisor, my manager holds “sales huddles” twice a day. The morning huddles are designed to repeat what our regional guy said on the Monday call, and to praise my colleagues who are knocking their numbers out of the park. It’s also an opportune time to publicly humiliate those employees who aren’t quite making the cut, or at the very least not fixing their numbers like the top sales guys in my office usually do. This is also where we make our daily sales commitments.
We also have an afternoon huddle at 5, which realls serves to prevent anyone from leaving work at what they might consider a reasonable time. This huddles is used to compare our daily sales results to our commitments, and to address any operational concerns. The old Willie hated the afternoon huddles because he was accustomed to running out the door at 4:59 every day. The new Willie relishes having to spend a full hour in an evening huddle, and being released from said meeting with at least another hour of work and report-generating waiting at his desk. I can never spend too much time at work.
You wanna know the most brilliant part about having all of these meetings? I ran the numbers, and I spend about 8 hours a week in meetings. That’s a full workday for most of you. Be jealous. While i’m working the equivalent of 6 days each week, I take pride in knowing that i’m spending a solid day each week listening to people cheer and talk about the same set of numbers every single day.
