INC 5 held an exceptional sales meet for sharpening the sales team, building camaraderie, generating ideas and reviewing employees’ needs and achievements.
Meetings suck. It’s time for the teams and people to evade doing actual work, stare blankly at the presenters or boring talks, throw in general ideas to look like they are concerned for the organization and paying attention, and if you’re blessed, maybe come out with some terrific sketches. Is that how people perceive most of the marketing meetings?
INC 5 Meet certainly wasn’t that way. The three-day annual general meeting, 2015-16 held at Gurgaon was attended by store managers from their pan India outlets. The team turned it into a very useful, creative and compelling content. As it’s evident that, as your team grows, it really is important for everyone to get in a room together and talk about what they’ve been working on in their corner of the world. So to ensure those marketing meetings aren’t blocks of time your team dreads, take these tips for how to make marketing team meetings truly useful for your employees.
Inc 5‘s annual meeting is one of their employees’ key morale events. Here, its 100-plus strong team has the opportunity to hear from company executives about the year in review, direction for the coming year, and new products in development. On day one, Harish Sairaman, a motivational speaker, had the best of the team and individuals doled out amazing insights and compete in fun games to bring enormous management tricks on team work and achieving goals. The teams were created by product groups.
Abdul Noorallah Virji, founder of the group, presided and graced the meet and shared many insights from his retail journey and experiences. The meet, stretched over three days, had a healthy mix of retail and sales content, and educational content. Various team members shared and presented briefly about interesting projects they had been working on. It served two purposes: it let the entire sales team know what their team members do all day; plus, they get to learnt something new.
Virji shared learning from projects that could help everyone expand their knowledge base, sidestep landmines if a project backfired, and implement effective new techniques that they never knew worked.
To build team camaraderie at the event, the attendees were seated by product groups and encouraged to wear attire that uniquely identified and created camaraderie.
Big Wins
A little bit of recognition is a good thing. Rajesh Kadam, COO shared amazing things with team members or the department as a whole had accomplished. He said,“It’s easy to harp on where you’re falling behind, but a little cheerleading can help rally your team and remind them just how successful they can be when they put their mind to it.” The larger a team gets, the easier it is to work in silos — but everyone has their own little super powers that sometimes go unnoticed. If there is a platform during every meeting for employees to share (if they need it) something they need a little help with, you may find others piped up with a simple solution or resource that solves the problem.
The second day was taken up by a session on Loyalty Program Team, wherein the best performing store in handling the loyalty software was felicitated. The session had an invigorating discussion on how to make the visiting guest a loyal patron of the brand.
Few industry luminaries, Ketan Vyas, PRO, Sumit Walia, Aerosoles, Anurag, Skechers and Navin Joseph, Crocs, shared enlivening presentations and their insights on retail. Interesting, at this meet, for the first time an associate brand was felicitated for performance in sale and the award was bagged by Skechers.
Kadam led a session on team development and creating leaders in stores. The entire visiting staff was divided according to streams i.e. In-house Teams of HOD’s, Women Section, Brand, Operations, Warehouse, Logistics and Stock, Accounts, HR and IT team who conducted short sessions on various aspects of retail business.
The management honoured various staff members for their outstanding performance in multiple categories like Best Display, Fastest growing store, Emerging Store and Manager for the year.
