Sales 1-on-1 meetings

Are you looking for tips and ideas to execute the perfect one-on-one meeting with your Business Development Representatives (BDRs)? We can help! In this post, you’ll learn how to effectively coach and support your BDR’s with this weekly one-on-one sales meeting agenda.

Good sales managers understand the importance of regular check-ins with each of their business development representatives. But too often, one-on-one sales meetings happen without a specific agenda or discussion points, making them disorganized and ineffective. 

What should you include in your sales meeting agenda to coach and support your BDRs? Use this template to run one-on-one sales meetings that drive great results.

What’s inside this sales 1-on-1 meeting template:

1 Review last week’s performance

What were last week’s goals? Did you achieve them? 

Many BDR’s expect their manager to have high demands to meet what feel like unattainable business development goals, to avoid overwhelming your reps try breaking goals down into more manageable chunks. Creating incremental goals and check-ins during weekly one-on-one meetings can help you and your BDR’s better track and measure progress towards the overarching sales goal you’re trying to reach. In an article for Survey Monkey, noted that “more sales teams need to focus on the overall sales process, and not just the final results.” At each meeting, ask your BDR to reflect on the previous week’s meeting and the goals you set for them to complete between meetings. 

Next on the agenda is to talk about whether or not these goals were met, and why or why not. Reward your BDR’s success, ask them to elaborate on their achievements and encourage them to share any accomplishments outside of their set goals. If any of the week’s goals went unmet, use this as an opportunity for further coaching with your sales development reps, check out the coaching tips and best practices at the end of this article! 

Laurie Page, Managing Partner at Bridge Group, recommends including more holistic questions in your performance check-ins as well, “Go beyond the metrics” she says. “For example, as a Sales Leader, I always had reps come with responses to the following questions:” sharing that she asks her reps to name their “top 2 accomplishments”, and their “top 2 challenges with a proposed solution” during the previous week. 

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2 Discuss challenges

At your sales one-on-ones it’s just as important to discuss BDR’s successes as it is to address their barriers to success.

All too often, employees struggle with problems they could easily overcome with a little managerial support. Let your BDR’s know that it is safe, and even encouraged, to speak up when they need help. In an article for Harvard Business Review, Paul Axtell, author of “Make Meetings Matter”, explained the importance of making meetings a safe space for honest conversation, “The quest for better meetings ultimately lies in leading with mutual respectful, inclusivity, and establishing a space that is safe enough for people to speak their minds.” Not only does this openness foster better relationships between you and your BDR’s, you may also gain practical feedback on how to improve certain sales processes. 

Ask probing questions such as, “What were your biggest blockers?”, and provide an opportunity for the BDR to help co-create a solution by asking “How can we work these challenges out?” You might also get some useful, practical feedback on how to improve certain workplace processes or some suggestions for helpful new tools to implement.

3 Determine this week’s goals

The last item of business on your sales one-on-one meeting agenda should be setting your BDRs goals for the week ahead. Empower your BDR and encourage them to take ownership of their goals by asking what their targets are for the upcoming week. This practice can also be applied to setting quarterly and annual goals. Goals that employees don’t have any control over will cause morale to plummet and performance to follow suit.

Encourage BDRs also to take career advances into consideration when setting goals. This can include anything from expanding skills and knowledge to collaborating with other teams to gain the experience they need to advance in their careers.

It was Harvard Business School Working Knowledge who once said, “If a meeting is important enough to have, it should have an agenda.” Here is a summary of the items to include in the agenda for your one-on-one meetings with BDR’s.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders, the author of How to Invest Your Time Like Money, and the founder of Real Life E Time Coaching & Training, told Harvard Business Review that “One-on-ones are one of the most important productivity tools you have as a manager”. This sales one-on-one agenda is the perfect sales manager’s checklist to effectively coach and support your business development representatives at every meeting.