Strategic B2B meetings are the lifeline for business success. Most strategic meetings take place with customers, prospects, vendors, decision-makers, and other stakeholders at events, briefing centers, roadshows, etc. This makes them one of the most effective tools for B2B enterprises looking to accelerate business growth.
Strategic meeting management entails handling of a number of elements like managing responses, attendees, calendars, etc., In most cases, meeting managers and coordinators use spreadsheets and emails to manage meetings. But with the process becoming more demanding, meeting managers have recognized that these tools are outdated and ill-suited to manage a large volume of strategic interactions.
In this blog, we discuss the top five pitfalls of using a spreadsheet-based meeting management system:
Collaboration
Meeting scheduling is a collaborative process. The process typically involves multiple stakeholders that are required to fill in different fields to effectively keep track of the meetings being scheduled. This gives rise to a serious challenge while planning schedules, namely conveying changes and updates with other stakeholders. Moreover, there is no guarantee that all of the collaborators are using the same version of the sheet.
Error-prone process
Entering data on spreadsheets is largely a manual process. According to a report, nine out of ten spreadsheets contain errors caused by manual data entry. In general, manual errors are understandable, but these errors, although completely avoidable, can potentially end up costing companies millions of dollars.
Meeting invites
Spreadsheets are undoubtedly great platforms to capture a large pool of static data and make calculations but they are not equipped to do much else. Once meetings have been set up on call, it is important to send out invites without delay. And this is something that spreadsheets cannot help with. In addition to that, simply managing and keeping track of rescheduled meetings, and change in meeting details can turn out to be a massive challenge.
Integrations
The entire sales process entails numerous functions managed on multiple platforms – like recording event registrations, capturing data from badge scans, tracking meeting check-ins, accessing and entering data to and from the CRM, etc. More often than not, these platforms work in silos and are not kept in sync. This makes the entire process needlessly drawn out. The challenge, therefore, is maintaining a spreadsheet-based system that does not have the capability to integrate with these platforms to create a seamless experience.
Tracking metrics and deriving insights
Events, trade shows, briefing centers are a hive of information. Metrics like the number of meetings that took place, the number of meeting invites accepted, average deal size, the number of meetings per deal closed, etc., are extremely useful while evaluating the success of campaigns and establishing ROI.
According to a study by Kissmetrics, approximately 82% of marketers at events cannot measure or draw insights from strategic meetings. This is largely because the tools they use, which is a combination of spreadsheets and emails do not provide them with the right features to capture this information and convert it into actionable data.
The biggest priority that B2B marketers have is to shorten the sales cycle and create meeting experiences that impact the business. The points discussed above are just a few reasons why spreadsheets are inadequate in the current scenario to manage a large volume of strategic meetings. Fortunately, there is a smarter solution to this conundrum. Visit www.jifflenow.com to learn more or click on the button below to schedule a quick demo.
