And just like that, a meeting has come to an end! Right from curating the agenda, ensuring the right participants, and concluding the meeting with a Q&A session, organizing a meeting is a long but effective process. But a meeting manager’s task is not yet completed for the steps taken after is just as important as the meeting itself which is to summarize and record the meeting.
Importance of Meeting Summary
Meeting summaries, which also contain Minutes of a Meeting (MoM) is a summary or report of the meeting containing information regarding all the points that were discussed – highlights, decisions made, future plans, resolving issues, questions in the parking lot, and so on. This document exists to provide an overview of the meeting for review as well as for future reference.
The meeting summary will also serve as a reference for those who were unable to attend especially if tasks were assigned to them during the course of the meeting.
Generally, prior to the start of the meeting, one person is assigned to compile the meeting summary. Taking down notes during the meeting and recording the session (with prior permission) will be useful to ensure that the session is summarized correctly without errors.
A meeting summary should be succinct, concise, and easy to understand.
Follow-up
A meeting agenda is not always followed-through in just one sitting. Sometimes, certain queries or tasks may not be addressed during the session due to lack of time, going off-tangent, or because it wasn’t a priority at that time. Therefore, scheduling a follow-up meeting is the logical choice to address all of the above.
Generally, parking lot questions or those asked during Q&A sessions are also addressed during follow-up meetings, especially if answers were not found during the previous meeting. Apart from this, follow-up meetings are also scheduled in order to advance the sales cycle. Sometimes consecutive follow-up meetings are scheduled if a customer requires immediate nurturing and if not, these meetings will be scheduled at a later date. The goal is to drive business, therefore follow-up meetings are organized considering this.
Another important aspect that follow-up meetings address is feedback. Finding out ways to improve based on the previous session or brainstorming for new ideas. But more on this in Part V of the #PerfectMeetings series.
Meetings at events are what drive business. These sessions are necessary to help an enterprise reach business goals but for this, meetings need to be scheduled and managed flawlessly. Enter the realm of Meeting Automation Platforms, the answer to every meeting manager’s dream. This platform will aid in scheduling, managing, and analyzing meetings while offering integrations with other automation platforms and are also GDPR compliant. All workflows associated with pre-meeting management, in-meeting management, and post-meeting analysis is automated, leaving no room for errors.
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