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Meetings are critical to achieving our performance goals! It is through these meeting, whether F2F, virtual, phone, that we engage our customers, helping them navigate their buying/problem solving process.
So it stands to reason, that more meetings would drive higher levels of performance. To increase our attainment, we just need to conduct more meetings.
And for many, achieving meeting goals is a critical performance metric. We know how many meetings we have to conduct to find and qualify a deal. The math to get 10 new qualified deals is easy. We can now set goals for meetings, doing the math for the new deals needed, the goal we have to hit, and so forth.
But there are a lot of problems with just looking at the number of meetings as a key indicator of our ability to achieve our goals.
The number of meetings is terribly misleading, it tells us nothing about what we accomplish in each meeting. And isn’t that the point of a meeting? Aren’t we there to achieve something, to move things forward?
Or what if, through conducting high impact meetings, we reduce the number of meetings we need to win deals? I’ve written, before, in our own organization, through thoughtful redesign of how we conduct meetings, we reduced the average number of meetings to close from 22 to 9. In the process, we were both far more productive, but customers welcomed this because they were accomplishing more. And that, in turn, helped us further improve our win rate.
When we look at the customer side of this. They are telling us what they think with their calendars. They don’t want to meet with sellers because too many waste their time. So while sellers are looking for more meetings, our customers are going in the opposite direction. That would argue that for any meeting we manage to have, we must accomplish far more with the customer.
There’s another problem with a meeting metric. Once the meeting becomes the goal, rather than the outcome of meetings, people become fixated on it, then start gaming it. They start thinking, “how do I meet my meeting goal?” As an example of this, some years ago, I was working with a client where the sales people had a weekly meeting goal. One seller stood out, his weekly meeting attainment was usually about 50% more than his peers. I wanted to understand why he was having so many meetings, so I started listening to the calls that had been recorded. I discovered a huge number of “meetings” were calls to friends and catching up. He also knew the meeting had to last a certain amount of time, so when he hit that time, he would hang up, then call his friend back.
While this example may seem extreme, whatever metric we establish, our people will find the easiest way to achieve that goal, as they should. We drive certain behaviors with every metric we establish, and those behaviors may not be the behaviors we want to achieve our goals.
Meetings are important, but not because we have to achieve a meeting goal. We want meetings that enable us to create value with the customer, moving them through their buying process. Before we focus on number of meetings, we have to first address the quality of the meetings.
I would be a hypocrite, if I didn’t confess that within my team, each of us has a weekly “high impact” meeting metric. This year my personal goal is 5/week. In our team they vary between 5-9. But to qualify for a high impact meeting, we have very specific goals. They have to be with certain types of people, within our ICP, on certain problem areas. And the meeting has to achieve certain outcomes. If we have the conversation and it doesn’t achieve those outcomes, it doesn’t count. And as you may guess, there are a number of meetings we might have with subordinates and others to get those high impact meetings with these executives. I don’t care about those meetings and how many it takes. It is work we must do to arrange the meetings.
Number of meetings is important, but we don’t need to count each meeting. What we accomplish in each meeting is, probably, more important than the number of meetings that we have.
Now imagine a world where every meeting we have is a high impact meeting. The number of meetings we need to find high quality opportunities will plummet. The number of meetings we need to move the customer through their buying process will plummet. We will need far fewer meetings to accomplish our goals, than is required now.
Then what do we do with that free time? We have the opportunity to exceed our quotas, to pursue more opportunities, to grow far faster than we ever imagined.
Quality before quantity, always!
Afterword: My favorite AI “personalities” discuss the blog post, offering some interesting perspectives. Enjoy!
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