Meetings at events go by the clock. With the number of target customers present, organizing meetings and ensuring they are as productive as possible takes a great deal of patience and planning.
At events, marketers tend to get drawn into many different discussions, making it difficult to pay attention to how customers experience the brand as a whole. In our previous blog, we took you through the six characteristics of a successful B2B meeting. Here, we take you through five things to avoid at your next meeting and how your meeting management app can help you avoid them.
1. Making customers wait in long queues
If there’s one thing that attendees hate to do, it’s waiting in long queues to give you their information. They are constantly on the lookout for engaging business-oriented interactions. And with a packed schedule, there’s nothing they find more annoying than waiting in line to get their badges scanned.
Thankfully, there is a solution to this. A meeting management software can help you integrate your badge scanner with your CRM. This way, once a badge is scanned, attendee information directly flows into the CRM interface thereby significantly simplifying the process and letting your customers cut straight to the meeting.
2. Forgetting to re-confirm time-zones
Usually, meeting requests are set by default to the organizer’s time zone. But this might not be clear to attendees. Overlooking time zone errors in the meeting invite can not only disrupt their plans but yours as well.
Good business etiquette recommends that meetings requests are in line with the time-zone that best suits the majority of your meeting attendees. This lets your customers plan their schedules effectively. Alternatively, a meeting management software that integrates with your calendar apps like GCal and iCal is sure to help your customers avoid errors while planning their schedules.
3. Improper meeting space management
Meeting spaces are among the biggest investments at events. There have been many instances where prospects come in for a meeting only to find that there are no meeting rooms available. This can seriously deter customers from having a sales conversation with your representatives.
In order to ensure that they are being used sufficiently, it is important that meeting spaces be considered a resource that needs to be accounted for. A meeting management app like Jifflenow can help you manage your inventory of meeting rooms, allocate meeting spaces according to requirements and plan meetings according to availability.
4. Not having the right executives present
Often, customers engage in a conversation only to find that the person that they are talking to does not know much about the product or is not qualified to make decisions. In other words, they prefer productive conversations as opposed to superficial ones. This is why it important to have the right people present to help attendees understand your product and its value proposition. And having SMEs or higher level executives present significantly cuts short the decision-making process.
Sales meetings often require high-level management executives to help lure customers into the sales cycle. And SMEs help customers understand the technical aspects of the product. With a meeting scheduling app, you can map the right people to attend your meetings by managing their calendars. Doing this ensures that customers have everything they need to take a calculated sales decision.
5. Overlooking crucial meeting metrics
Sales representatives often face a race against time to reach out to as many customers as possible and close deals. With such a large number of interactions taking place, it becomes important to measure how well these meetings are and understand what needs to be rectified for future events.
Events are a goldmine for insightful information. With a well-rounded meeting management app, you can access crucial metrics to help you measure the effectiveness of sales teams, understand what worked, and what went wrong across the event. This can further indicate the sort of corrective measures to increase meeting productivity immediately as well as for subsequent events.
Related: 5 insightful B2B sales metrics to keep an eye out for.
Events pose tremendous opportunities for sales teams to access a large section of their target audience and close as many deals as possible within the duration of the event. But more often than not, meetings do not turn out to be productive because of redundancies in specific processes. Technology has not only caught up with the way the event industry functions but dictates how events are experienced in this age. And it threatens to leave behind those that do not get on board.
