Every week, tens of thousands of real estate sales teams gather at an appointed time and place each week to conduct what they bill as a "meeting."

Unfortunately, the scheduled event is more than sometimes simply a monologue - and a deathly-dull one at that - or a ménage, a gathering of the office family with no discernable objectives.

Given enough preparation, substance and prior thought, your weekly meeting can be an hour (no more, please!) of power for you and your marketing team. Without these three catalysts, it is likely to be the "snooze of the day."

The arrival of that appointed hour brings you, as meeting leader, eyeball-to-eyeball with a solemn obligation you have to those in attendance; you are obliged to make their investment of time a profitable one, both for them and the company they represent.

Never forget that the cost of any meeting (or monologue or ménage) is the sum-total of the value of the time of all participants - calculated at what that time would be worth if it were devoted to their most productive pursuits.

A one-hour sales meeting attended by twenty people costs twenty times the average hourly value of their time when they are nose-to-nose and toes-to-toes with prospective buyers and sellers.

Using a conservative estimate of $50 per hour (a reasonable rate for any productive sales associate), the cost to them as a group is $1,000, to which must be added the company’s share of what they are not bringing in when they are sitting in on the "meeting." And that cost is real!

Your meetings will be successful and profitable only when they incorporate these five critical elements:

• Information - Provided on a "need-to-and-want-to-know" basis.
• Training - Geared to the sophistication level of the entire group.
• Inspiration - So that they leave with both the desire and a will to excel.
• Recognition - Of every conceivable achievement, however modest.
• Participation - By the largest possible percentage of attendees.

Inclusion of these elements demands early and adequate preparation by the meeting leader. Good sales meetings don’t just happen spontaneously; they are carefully prepared, well in advance.

Too seldom employed, but always a good idea, is the building of an agenda. This should be designed with subjects arranged in the order of their importance, so that even if the allotted time for the meeting runs out before the agenda has been completed, the most important stuff will have been covered.

In building your agenda, be conscious of the fact that a meeting is only one means of communicating with the team - and that every item on the agenda must be of interest to most (preferably all) of the attendees. If it is not, better cover it with smaller groups or targeted memos, rather that lose a big chunk of your audience. (Once they drift away, they aren’t easy to recapture!)

If agenda preparation is deferred until the eleventh hour, as is often the case, it will be driven by desperation and constructed with whatever "spare parts" are easily clutchable, this on the flawed notion that anything is better than nothing. Not always so!

A better method is to maintain five file folders, labeled with the five elements listed above. Keep them within an arm’s length of your desk chair and cultivate the habit of stuffing each one with things like local/national news, new laws and regulations, vignettes from books and tapes, ideas, emerging trends, creative techniques, problems, happenings and other seed materials that come your way during the week. Those that don’t fit into your next meeting will surely be appropriate for a meeting some weeks down the line.

Before your agenda has been finalized, subject each item to this critical quiz:

• Does it fit into one of the five essential elements listed above?
• Will it capture and hold the interest of most (if not all) of those in attendance?
• Is a meeting the most effective way to get the message to the proper people?
• Is it really worth the valuable time it will consume?

If you encounter a "no" response to all of these queries, give serious consideration to either reworking the subject so that it merits a "yes" or deleting it from the agenda.

All of us have left so-called meetings wishing we could have otherwise used the time, which (regardless of their importance and/or good intentions) was a serious indictment of whoever called the meeting and planned (or failed to plan) its agenda.

If you’ve never gotten a standing ovation at one of your regular meetings, you might get your first one by canceling the next meeting until you have time to employ these tips!

The bottom line is never call and conduct a gathering of your productive people just because it’s Monday or Tuesday morning. If it stacks up as nothing more than a monologue or a ménage, it should just be canceled, period.