How many meetings have you looked at a colleague and thought, “Is that person totally checked out?” Remote work has made meetings more frequent but also made multi-tasking (or just completing checking out) even easier. In Your Company Meetings are Broken, Everpeak highlights how important but largely ineffective meetings are for most organizations as well as the lack of any process or training. Some of the stats in this article:

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• The Harvard Business Review says spend over 23 hours per week in meetings.
• Overall, employees feel that 70% of all meetings are not a good use of time and keeping them from more valuable work.
• 45% of employees admit to feeling overwhelmed by meetings.

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But what role does technology play?  This article illustrates how Everpeak used a simple Salesforce custom object to transform how it runs client meetings.

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The Problem

At Everpeak, we operate largely remotely with clients. Face-to-face client meetings are rare. Traditionally, we’ve recorded all meetings and tagged them to clients in a Notes field.  The Notes field in Salesforce is effective for what it is designed to do —> act like a virtual post-it not for any content that can be tied to any contact, lead or account.

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But even with training and process around how to conduct meetings, this setup hamstrung our effectiveness. A few key issues:

• Videos recording can be useful for demos and screen shares, but routine meetings require to much time and manual review to find the desired information.
• The native Notes feature was not built for logging meetings
  • The date updates to the last modified or access date - not when the meeting was initially logged
  • There is only one field
  • There are no other fields to link to material (ie a video recording)

Since this out-of-the-box object was not built for our exact use-case, it didn’t work particularly well. And since it didn’t work particularly well, nobody used it.

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The Solution

Everpeak created a very light weight solution in the form of a Salesforce custom object that we call Meeting Notes. This solution has now been implemented with many other clients under names they choose and with modifications they choose, but the intent is the same —> Create an easy-to-use solution for recording meetings.

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For Everpeak, there were a few key requirements.

• Our process required that each meeting have
  • an agenda as well
  • action items (aka To Do list)
• Ability to link to a video recording in its own field, if applicable
• Ability to add an attachment, if applicable
• Date created would be the primary date for reporting - not date modified
• Ability to use Salesforce Chatter to tag employees who may not have been present
• The Meeting Note is viewable from any contact, lead, account or opportunity that is tagged

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Within hours, our team created Meeting Notes to do just this.

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The Results

Perhaps the single most significant result of Meeting Notes was that people actually began using it! Having three sections - Agenda, Notes, and Action Items - meant that any employee could quickly pull a report to see that week’s action items and ensure all were done. This was a huge efficiency gain for both employees and managers.

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Furthermore, with the created date as static, Everpeak was able to mandate that Meeting Notes were logged within 24 hrs of a client meeting. This was very easy to check, and if a client had no meetings logged for an extended period, the reason could only be that 1) there were no meetings, or 2) the Meeting Notes were not logged.

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Either option demanded some corrective action.

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The adoption has also made creating guidelines for meetings - both internal and external - much easier. Our Salesforce instance makes it easy for employees to adhere to the process, but most importantly, employees find Meeting Notes useful. This is crucial for almost any process built within a CRM.

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Our clients have adapted Meeting Notes in different ways to fit their business.

‍Contact us to learn how Everpeak can transform both internal and external meetings for your organization.

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