Sales huddles are essential to building and maintaining a winning sales culture. Huddles align priorities, spotlight metrics, and raise energy so reps hit pipeline-building activities faster.
Remote team? Run your sales huddle on any video platform—just keep cameras on to preserve face-to-face energy.
A sales huddle is a short, high-energy daily sales stand-up—not a traditional sales meeting
I'll say this again throughout this piece, but it's important that you understand that a huddle is not just another name for a sales meeting. It's a distinctly different experience and serves a distinctly different purpose.
If you've ever worked in a large enterprise sales team, you might have experienced conventional sales meetings as a recurring nuisance for the sales manager to organize and a dreaded waste of time for the reps. A huddle is the exact opposite: you want to leave your reps wanting more.
Remember that you don't want to push any old sales meeting idea into your huddle. So, while I'll offer you a wide range of ideas, I want you to be deliberate when deciding which ones to include in your agenda.
Set a goal for the day or until the next huddle. This can be an activity goal, an outcome goal, or a personal learning goal. Setting sales goals also enables your team to hold each other accountable and fosters a sense of friendly competition.
Find fun ways to create incentives for reps that hit their goal, whether cold, hard cash or simply recognition in the company, celebrating a "rep of the day" in Slack chat or a simple shoutout from the team. You can level up by creating company merch as a reward for extraordinary achievements. You don't have to worry about upfront costs; companies like Printify offer no investment in merch creation.
Encourage people to share their wins. But also watch out for those team members who aren't as vocal about their wins and prompt them to share a specific win you know would be good to hear for the team.
And only key metrics. In other words, only relevant and actionable metrics for the entire team should make it into your huddles. Remember: A huddle is not a conventional sales team meeting.
Schedule huddles via your calendar and surface real-time CRM dashboards (leaderboards, activity, talk time) to guide coaching.
Use data to guide best practices. Look at what the data tells you about top-performing reps and how they differ from low-performing reps, especially on an activity level.
Real-time activity metrics like dials made, emails sent, and talk time are often good ones to bring up, particularly for reps doing prospecting or building their own sales pipeline.
LinkedIn is an excellent platform if you're in B2B sales these days. Assign one rep per day to post on LinkedIn; the team comments within 60 minutes to boost reach (likes, meaningful comments, tag prospects).
All this will help create engagement and surface the content to a wider audience on LinkedIn. It leads to more employee recognition and raises awareness for your brand.
Ask your team what they want to be part of the agenda. Not only will it give them a sense of ownership, but often, you'll find that they come up with the best ideas. (That's certainly been the case many times for me.)
Depending on your crew's size, you might want to use a few icebreakers to warm them up. Find what's right for you here. This can be sharing a silly sales moment, cracking a few jokes about the marketing team and the leads they provide, making a self-deprecating joke, or asking a non-work-related icebreaker question.
Some potential icebreaker questions:
If none do it for you, you can check out this exhaustive list of icebreaker questions for various scenarios.
Pick one tip that can help your reps sell more. This could be a sales tactic, a cold-calling tip that helps reps engage prospects more effectively, a quick role-play for a particular situation, or a good response to a specific sales objection.
But don't try to fit too much into it. Focus on just one per huddle that your reps can take away.
You can give your salespeople the option to share a specific challenge they've encountered. You and the team can then offer support and advice. Fostering this kind of peer sales coaching also helps create a sense of camaraderie amongst your reps.
Everything you do during a huddle should be motivating, but one of the most powerful things you can do is create a ritual that gets the entire team fired up.
We've had sales teams that used to watch one of my Daily Sales Motivation videos every day together to get started. They'd get an inspirational sales quote and a corresponding action item to get them fired to make sales calls.
You can even come up with quick game ideas to play.
Sales huddle games are a great way to reinforce elements of your sales training program on an ongoing basis and keep your reps sharp. You can also check out our list of sales training games and design shorter versions.
As always, you don't want this to be a typical sales meeting agenda. Keep it simple. Focus on something that makes an emotional impact. Over time, complexity can overwhelm us. It's your job as a sales leader to create clarity and camaraderie for your whole team.
Less is more when it comes to your agenda. Keep it tight.
Should [agenda item] be part of a huddle?
If you're not sure whether to include a particular agenda item, lean towards no. It's better to keep your huddles a bit lean than stuff too much into them until they become pointless. Don't just try to fit typical sales meeting topics into a huddle—make your huddles unique and distinct within your sales organization.
The last thing you want is for your reps to feel this is just lost selling time.
How often is best for your team? It really depends, but one thing that's universally true is to stick to a consistent schedule and create a clear structure for your team.
The guiding principle should be: Do your reps usually look forward to the huddle, or do they dread it? If they dread it, are bored by it, or perceive it as a waste of time, roll back and do your huddles less often, keeping them shorter. (More on the ideal length of a huddle later on.)
Just do it in the morning. One of the primary objectives is to get your team members amped up, and there's little point in doing so once they wrap up their day.
There's a side benefit to doing it in the morning, too, especially if you're doing daily huddles: It helps to keep your reps on time. Reps perform best consistently when you give them a clear structure, and the daily morning ritual gets them in the right mindset.
The only other time a huddle might make sense is in the early afternoon. That time is after lunch, when the energy in the room is typically low, and reps could use a push to get into a higher gear.
Another factor to consider: If your team has the best reach rates at a particular time of day, you don't want to interfere with that. So, if your reps schedule the most meetings between 1 pm and 3 pm, don't make them attend a huddle during their peak time.
The simple answer is slightly shorter than your team wants them to be.
Your sales reps should look forward to the huddles. They're also called stand-up meetings; if done daily, they can be called daily sales scrums. If you're doing them standing up, that's all the more reason to keep them short.
You won't be sitting around a table munching pastries and sipping coffee.
In general, the more often you conduct a huddle, the shorter it should be. If you're conducting daily sales huddles, I recommend 5 to 15 minutes, with a maximum of 30 minutes.
If you do just one huddle weekly, 15 to 30 minutes is adequate.
But keep in mind: A huddle is not a traditional sales meeting. Keep it short and sweet. Make it an event, an emotional experience that aligns your whole team. There's nothing worse than making your salespeople come together for something they perceive as a waste of time.
Well, you, the sales manager. Right? If you're reading this article, the answer is probably you, whether you're a team lead, director, or founder involved in the day-to-day sales process.
When one of your sales reps starts going off on a tangent or dives too deep into a particular subject, it's your responsibility to step in and moderate. Tell them: "You're making a great point, and I think this deserves its discussion. Let's add it as a sales meeting agenda item (or discuss it 1-on-1), and for the sake of time, let's move on so we can wrap up this huddle on time."
You should have some structure; creating a template is the best way to do that.
If you conduct your huddles completely face-to-face on a video call, a mental outline is all you need.
But we're visual creatures. It helps to give your team something to look at.
You can use a Google Slides, PowerPoint, or Apple Keynote template for your daily huddles and either project that into the room or do a screen share in your online conferencing tool.
Share a dashboard or report from your CRM showcasing real-time metrics. Sales leaderboards are great for daily huddles as they help foster healthy internal competition.
You absolutely should design your format, but looking at some templates as a starting point and seeing what you want to take is often helpful. However, always remember the primary purpose of your huddles: Do you want to motivate? Educate? Foster team spirit? Get a sense of how the team and reps are doing.
The main objective of your huddles should determine how you structure them. (You can also rotate this for different days of the week.)
Alright, this is a tongue-in-cheek agenda. Don't use it, but there's a reason I listed it here.
Time: 45 minutes
Again, don't use this. I included it here because I see this way too often, which is why many sales teams hate huddles and consider them a waste of time. (And in this case, they're right.)
Time: 5 minutes
A quick 10-minute huddle to get the team excited and motivated. This is extra powerful if you find an overarching theme for the win, the goal, and how you motivate them.
An example of a theme could be to foster collaboration. In that case, motivational quotes about sales teamwork can be great for wrapping up your session. If you do a Monday huddle, quotes that get your reps fired up for the week are a good fit.
Time: 15 minutes
You might think: What's the point of coaching for one specific challenge in seven minutes? How meaningful can anything that you can coach in seven minutes be?
But there's something powerful about a focused, seven-minute session. It forces you to narrow down on one specific idea, situation, problem, or technique.
Your reps will often find that they are already familiar with what you coach, which helps solidify the learning even for those already good at it. It also helps those who aren't good at this technique yet. It also gives reps a chance to weigh in with their tips, and top performers might be able to contribute an alternative angle.
Also, check out Mark Brooks's agenda template, which more closely resembles a conventional sales meeting yet is still well-designed.
You can ask your team what their favorite takeaway from the meeting was or how it will impact their day. You can reinforce the main point of the meeting or have some sort of final ritual to elevate the energy of your reps.
The best sales leaders understand that their #1 job is to create an environment for their reps that brings out the best in them. They give them all the know-how, sales resources, and incentives they need to win—and then fire them up and set them free.
Sales huddles are powerful tools for keeping reps on track, managing crew energy, elevating sales skills, and improving team performance.
Lead by example. Set the tone for the culture you want to see. Embody the attitude you want your reps to internalize.
Use the advice shared here to create or improve your huddles, but also keep an open and curious mind. Experiment and find out what works best for your team. And if you find something that works well, let me know on LinkedIn!
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