Meetings are an important aspect of every stage of the sales cycle. They help at every stage, be it in raising brand awareness, creating interest, pushing customers towards a purchase decision, or building on existing relationships.
Needless to say, meetings are an investment – of time, effort, and space, and have high opportunity costs.
Events account for the bulk of B2B meetings and these customer engagements need to be managed efficiently – to help drive sales pipeline and influenced revenue by shortening the sales cycle. Read on to learn about how meeting management can help you boost Event ROI by increasing the number and the quality of B2B meetings.
Meeting management tip #1: Creating meeting requests
Managing a large volume of meeting requests can be a daunting task. Coordinating meetings based on executive schedules, meeting locations, and attendee availability can get chaotic and error-prone, especially when using legacy tools and spreadsheets to manage meeting requests.
In most cases, multiple contributors have access to spreadsheets making it impossible to stay informed about changes in meeting schedules.
Through Jifflenow’s intuitive interface, requesters can schedule meetings based on what is important – time slots, availability of internal attendees like SMEs and key executives, and meeting spaces. Jifflenow also instantly notifies attendees of changes in the meeting schedule.
Meeting management tip #2: Formulating agendas
B2B meetings, irrespective of where they take place needs to be impactful. And for this reason, it is important to go in with an agenda.
An agenda is key to ensuring objectives are met and the conversation stays relevant. Moreover, providing internal and external attendees with a meeting agenda helps them prepare for the meeting and provides presenters with the conversational framework and ensures that everyone attending the meeting is on the same page well before the meeting starts.
Jifflenow helps meeting managers build custom agendas. Meeting requesters can specify the type of meeting, objectives, deal-related information, and topics of discussion.
Additionally, with the Jifflenow Salesforce integration, crucial details from Salesforce CRM instance are auto-populated in the meeting request, making it easy to drive better, more effective meetings.
Meeting management tip #3: Mapping topics to people
A meeting’s success depends a lot on how productive the conversation is. Not having the right people to steer the conversation towards closure can not only make the meeting fruitless but can prolong an already lengthy sales cycle.
Having the right topics to speak about can not only tell customers that their objectives matter but having the right SMEs present to address these topics can greatly persuade them to understand the product/service better.
Jifflenow provides a mapping utility to ensure that every topic is mapped to an owner or SME. This makes it easier to create meetings about topics and assign specific speakers to them as and when required.
As customers near the end of their sales cycle, they prefer speaking to people with authority and this makes it important to have people with sufficient influence to help make crucial decisions and close the deal. Jifflenow ensures that meetings involving high-level executives and decision-makers are prioritized with participation.
Meeting management tip #4: Action items and follow-up
B2B meetings are typically long conversations and a lot can be lost between what is being said and what is being passed on. The biggest challenge is closing the loop and conveying important information for subsequent meetings.
Having crucial deal-related information can not only set the precedent for meetings that follow but can help keep the conversation on track.
With the Jifflenow Salesforce information, meeting notes and action items can be easily fed back into Salesforce CRM and can be used as briefing material for internal attendees for the next meeting. Moreover, Jifflenow also helps Meeting Managers schedule subsequent meetings as soon as the meeting ends to ensure the gap between narrowing down on schedules and obtaining meeting acceptances.
Meeting management tip #5: Analytics and reports
Meetings are a hive of information. Analyzing meetings can tell you a lot you need to know about the efficiency of marketing and sales teams and if the efforts taken towards closing the deal was worth it or not.
Just keeping track of the number of meetings is an incomplete view. Metrics are a necessity to measure the impact of meetings and influenced revenue. Since these meetings are intricately interlocked with returns, the method for boosting the Event ROI hinges on the meeting metrics. Because what can be measured, can be improved.
With Jifflenow, meeting professionals can view crucial meeting metrics and analytics. Jifflenow’s comprehensive dashboards can help them keep track of the number of meetings that took place and monitor success rates.
Jifflenow also enables the generation of standard and custom reports that can help gain a complete view of sales performance and what needs to be done to get the most out of events.
Automation has become a hot topic given the current scenario. Enterprises have realized the economic impact of B2B meetings and how they help grow sales pipeline and revenue. According to a recent study by Aragon Research states that a majority of large companies will adopt a meeting automation solution by the year 2021.
Jifflenow is the world leader in Meeting Automation Platform with over 50 Fortune 1000 enterprises deploying it’s solutions to schedule, manage, and analyze meetings at events, trade shows, briefing centers, and roadshows.
To learn more about Meeting Automation Platform, speak to our product expert today.
