Addicted to Meetings

Yesterday I talked about the fact that it’s sometimes seems as though we all have the same job. And that job is simply to go to meetings. But, despite the inordinate number of hours we spend in these meetings, there’s no evidence that they produce a tremendous amount of value.

Plus, as we schedule meeting after meeting, it’s easy to lose sight of just how much productive time is being cannibalized by these events. Because no meeting actually takes an hour. It actually takes an hour from each person there. And that’s assuming that there’s no preparation, context, shifting time lag, or follow up activity. So a simple two person meeting costs two hours, a six person meeting 12 hours, and so forth.

One of the key takeaways when you dig into the proliferation of meetings is that many meetings have people included who are not needed there. Their time could be better spent elsewhere, and the the meeting does not demand their input, nor necessarily affect their work. They have been included for some other reason like wanting to be nice, not wanting to seem exclusionary, or because they happen to have a title that fits broadly into the category of others, invited to the meeting.

Today I thought we would look at some of the most common types of meetings and assess their value.

There seems to be an unwritten rule, so deeply entrenched that one might assume it’s an a priori truth, that every team needs regular “team meetings”; and that every project needs regular “project meetings”. You may be reading this and rolling your eyes, thinking to yourself, “well, obviously, those meetings are necessary ”.

Are they?

Project Meetings

When a team creates a project, it goes without saying that they will decide on a cadence for project reviews. Inevitably, it is some kind of weekly or biweekly meeting of all of the participants. That again seems like one of the great truths of organizations.

But is it really necessary? What is the purpose of a regular project review?

It is to find out whether aspects of the project are moving along as planned, whether there have been blockages, to ask if there are decisions to be made or problems to be solved. And establishing those fact does not require a meeting.

Projects can be managed using asynchronous tools. If, in fact, there are blocks or decisions to be made, then a meeting may be the best approach to handling it.

But there are not blocks and new decisions to make every week or every two weeks; And there certainly aren’t weekly roadblocks or decisions affecting everybody on the project team. When those issues arise —and they do—they affect some subset of the project team, not the whole team.

So rather than schedule meetings, why not schedule asynchronous reviews? Utilizing project management tools a single point person (the project owner) can review progress, hold people to account for updating their own work to the shared platform, and reach out when there are apparent stalls.

If a member of the project team runs into a roadblock or a dilemma, they can request a meeting with the people they feel would have important input, or whose authority is needed to make the decision. Again, these occurrences are probably far more rare than the typical project team meeting cadence.

Sales Meetings

This is an area that is rather close to my heart as I have been the head of revenue and have led multiple sales teams. And, like most people in that role, I did have a weekly meeting of the team. But what I did NOT have was a weekly review of an entire pipeline in which everybody reported on their own pipeline, and every single item in it. But that is the classic sales meeting.

Whether run by the VP of sales, or the lead salesperson, the structure of the weekly sales meeting is usually the same: Review the pipeline by going around the table asking each individual contributor (IC):?What’s in your pipeline? How is each prospect doing (one by one)? Have you moved the needle? Are you blocked? Do you need help? What is their probability of signing a contract?”

Yet, as ahead of sales, before ever walking into that meeting, I would already have reviewed everything in the CRM. I would have an export of that very pipeline report, and?know the answer to every question on the typical sales meeting agenda.

So, my sales meetings were very different. They addressed three things: First, the stalled areas of the pipeline and devising a team strategy to address that issue. These were collaborative action plans to get past a problem. Second, celebrating big wins. And third, setting targets for the week that were real-time adjustments to the quarterly targets. In other words, if we were lagging in new prospects, creating an ad hoc prospecting blitz with a goal for the week. The whole meeting took 15 minutes. And there was no CRM review except for my own which was done in advance.

Using the Tools You Have

On a well-run sales team, a CRM is the Bible. Every single conversation, objection, contractual change, request for more information, phone call, and email is recorded. Sales reps document everything. That is on a well-run sales team. And that may be the hardest part of a sales leader’s job. Getting their reps to use the CRM.

But, if you can’t get your reps to use the CRM, the sales meeting in its typical form won’t help. Because just as they have not documented the information in the CRM, their recollection of what has happened is tainted by the time they would report on it in a sales meeting. It has been corrupted by time, bias, and wishful thinking. It would be more useful to work on holding them accountable to document their work in the CRM than to have a sales meeting.

But, assuming your team does use the CRM for the most part, is a typical sales meeting structure really the best way to support them in producing results? Does taking an hour and reviewing the pipeline add to success in selling more?

Perhaps. And perhaps not. The entire sales team, and often others outside of it, spend an hour or more on this review every week. For any one of my clients that can be up to 9 people on a Zoom call. If it takes an hour,?that’s at least 9 collective hours of employee time?(not counting prep, context-shifting, etc.). Does it net more than 9 hours of value for the organization – as compared to other activities the participants could perform?

Where Does Value Get Created?

Here is the indisputable truth: You never close sales in a meeting. No sales meeting ever generates a single dime of revenue. For the reps who are NOT blocked, the coaching for those who are stuck?may?have nominal value. But is it more useful than being on the phone or prospecting for new customers or doing an initial pitch?

Based on my own experience as both a sales rep, a sales leader and a coach and consultant — NO. The value of traditional sales meetings is negligible. There are better ways to produce the desired result. Whether that’s having seasoned sales reps mentor those who are blocked, or using your time as a leader to work one on one with the weakest members of the team, or strategizing compensatory activities to deal with a lapse in velocity — every one of these options will probably drive more revenue and leave the team better empowered.

My point is not that all meetings are a waste of time. But, we have lots of un-interrogated habits in the form of meetings. We hold these meetings because somewhere along the way, we learned from somebody that that was how are you do business. Many are artifacts of pre-digital work.

But, in our own enterprises, when the world is moving as fast as it is, and our investors and Board of Directors are making the kinds of ambitious demands that they are, we can’t afford to do things without interrogating their purpose and value.

Meetings for the sake of meetings are ridiculous. If you lead a sales team, ask yourself what would be the best way to give your team, the tools, motivation, passion, and capability to bring revenue to the organization. Is it by doing a traditional sales meeting? Or is there something else for which you could use that time that would make a bigger difference?

This holds true whether it’s a regular team meeting, regular project meeting, regular sales meeting, or regular leadership team meeting. The common element is that these meetings are “regular”. And here, regular could just as easily be “habitual”. They are habits rather than well-thought-out tactics to produce a result.

Moreover, their regularity is description both of their frequency and their value. They are not designed to create anything new, or to accelerate or optimize anything. By virtue of their regularly, they are usually thoughtless—and therefore less useful than other things that could be done with that time by every individual in those meetings.

All of that said, the main takeaway here is that no meeting should be so regular that we stop questioning its value or necessity. Let’s have meetings with real purpose, instead of meetings that are simply regularly occurring.

Organizations that create incredible results often have skeptical and experimental cultures. They question themselves and their own ways of working. Coaching is a critical piece of that ongoing reinvention. Schedule a call to chat about whether your organization could explode its results with the addition of Beyond Better Coaching-as-a-Service.