Structuring your daily sales touchpoint for success

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When it comes to hosting an effective, daily sales touchpoint with your team, structure matters—a lot.

Which is why today we’re adapting some recommended sales stand-up templates for modern mortgage origination teams.

But first, if you’re unfamiliar with what a stand-up is or why you might want to start one, consider reading Should salespeople “stand-up” daily? from our newsletter archive.

Stand-up meeting templates we found ‘on the web’

Over the past month, our team has scoured the internet for the best examples of sales teams leveraging stand-ups (or scrums, as they’re called by Agile die-hards) to understand the general architecture of an effective sales stand-up meeting template.

What surprised us was how much variation we found. Some advocated a cross-industry approach to stand-ups:

Start with a review of recent wins
Ask each present team member three questions (we’ll dive into these more below)
A few quick team/company updates
End with a motivational “rally cry”

Others, tied Stand-ups directly to team Sprints (another Agile management principle), opting for weekly or even bi-weekly Stand-ups that:

Marked the launch of a new Sprint
Dissected breakthroughs and challenges from the previous Sprint
Aligned team members’ goals for the coming Sprint
Benchmarked performance against stated month-end goals

And still others seemed to just take the title of ‘Stand-up’ and simply apply it to otherwise prototypical sales meetings—replete with conference room bookings, PowerPoint presentations, and clips from Glengarry Glen Ross.

While we don’t condone that last approach (save for maybe the Glengarry Glen Ross clips), the two approaches above are clearly effective, have produced meaningful results for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of teams worldwide.

But would either work well for mortgage origination teams? In short, sort of.

While not perfect, the first of the two above approaches is universal enough to work for an origination team, but could benefit from optimizations.

The second, while appealing in concept, offers too few meetings in reality to help an origination team realize the unique benefits of adopting a Stand-up model for sales touchpoints.

So where does that leave us in our search for the ultimate Sales stand-up meeting template for modern origination teams? Well, developing our own.

A Stand-up meeting template designed for mortgage sales teams

Over the past few weeks our team has developed the first iteration of what we believe to be The Ultimate Template for Mortgage Sales Stand-ups.

Having synthesized lessons from Agile sales tacticians, Stand-up enthusiasts, virtual Scrum Masters, and even hard-core Glengary Glen Ross fans, we’ve strategically adapted the universal approach to Stand-ups specifically for mortgage origination teams.

While the full template has a detailed breakdown of why we structured the agenda the way we did, and even provides the logic behind every item on the agenda, our approach can be summed in—you guessed it—an acronym: align, inform, motivate, or AIM.

Align

With alignment arguably being the end goal of a Stand-up, our template kicks off by quickly celebrating recent team wins to align team members around what’s working, before diving into the meat of the agenda: the round robin.

The template includes detailed instructions on how to conduct a round robin (including our tailored questions for mortgage sales teams); but the gist is straightforward: asking each member of your team what sales opportunities they have today, how they’re generating future sales opportunities, and what obstacles they’re facing.

By starting with wins, identifying opportunities, sharing strategies for driving future business, and connecting team members to help one another overcome obstacles, Stand-ups are highly effective at maintaining team alignment on multiple levels.

Inform

Following the round robin, we recommend quickly sharing any critical team and company updates (save the tedious stuff for a memo, summary email, or stand-up meeting) followed by taking just a few minutes to highlight selling techniques and strategies that are working for your team, other teams within your org, or even top producers outside of your org.

Motivate

Lastly, we recommend ending each and every Stand-up with some time dedicated to motivating team members to make the most of every opportunity and to attack their day with excitement, positivity, and confidence.

Are you conducting a daily sales meeting?

If not, we highly recommend giving it a go—especially now that you have a free template with step-by-step instructions for getting started.

If you are, we’d love to hear how you conduct your daily sales touchpoint, and whether you think adopting a Stand-up model could make that touchpoint more efficient, effective, or even just more enjoyable.