The Remote Meetings Handbook

Introduction

The Rise of Remote Meetings

In recent years, one of the most significant changes technology has made in the workplace is to make the physical office space less critical, whether it’s for collaboration with your colleagues or engaging with prospects and customers.

Many organizations are hiring talent from all across the world, making teams increasingly distributed, while others prefer to create fully remote teams, allowing every employee to work from home. Even if most organizations don’t allow fully remote employees, they provide benefits like working from home for a few days to reduce commuting time.

As the need for remote work rises, the need for enhanced collaboration and communication across remote members has also increased significantly. While in-person meetings are relatively simple yet effective, remote meetings require slightly different practices and etiquettes, requiring one or more collaboration tools to ensure those meetings are successful.

Why Should You Read This Handbook?

In this handbook, you'll read the top dos and don'ts of hosting and participating in remote meetings with your prospects and customers. Remote meetings have unique advantages compared to in-person meetings, but to maximize these unique advantages, you’ll need to adapt yourself to the new way of doing things.

I’ll share some best practices, actionable tips, and useful tools to run remote sales and customer success meetings effectively, which will ultimately help you to close more deals and delight more customers. 

I’m 100% confident that you have already heard of a majority of these tips. But I also firmly believe that there will be a few tips that you might not have heard before and will find them valuable. Also, not all the tips apply to remote-only meetings. Many tips are applicable irrespective if it's a remote or an in-person meeting.

My goal is to make this a comprehensive list so you can find everything related to running any sales or customer meeting more effectively in just one place. I believe having this complete guide handily available; it will help you come across as an energetic professional in a remote meeting environment, just as you would in person.

I have organized these tips in 3 phases of the meeting's lifecycle - before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting, so you can easily understand which advice to use in which phase. 

1. “The Preparation Routine” before the meeting

A little preparation and a predefined structure before a meeting go a long way. By investing a few minutes before each meeting, you will develop a consistent routine with better habits that will lead to better outcomes.

The goal is to control the conversation, and consequently, the outcome of a meeting.

2. “The Engagement Routine” during the meeting

Special techniques help you start the conversation with impact, maintain momentum, and achieve the end goal. These practices come in handy to keep the meeting on track with your agenda.

The goal is to be engaging and informative during the meeting and be memorable after the meeting.

3. “The Follow-through Collaboration Routine” after the meeting

Remote meetings bring unique challenges - it needs to be very outcome-oriented as you don’t have another opportunity to conclude your meetings in an ad-hoc hallway conversation. It’s vital to have clarity about the next steps, collaborate with colleagues faster to get appropriate information and send prompt follow-ups to participants to maintain momentum.

The goal is to be efficient in follow-ups and collaboration to achieve desired goals faster.

Chapter 1: The Preparation Routine

With each meeting, you either move the opportunity or customer relationship forward, or you don’t. The time you spend in a meeting doesn’t just include the time conversing with them, but also the time you spend planning and strategizing before the meeting. Here are a few things that you can prepare before every meeting to make sure that you are set up for success.

In this chapter, we will cover the hidden nuances behind how to send a calendar invite, how to research participants, and how to come across as a strong professional even in a remote setup.

Calendar Invite

The most important aspect of having a great sales or customer success meeting is to be customer-centric and remove any kind of friction, and it starts with the calendar invite. It is something we all do so often that we hardly even think of it, but sometimes it’s tweaking the simple, everyday activities that make a big difference.

1. Add a one-word purpose statement in the Invite Title

If you are scheduling a Discovery or a Demo meeting with a prospect, it’s more effective to add that purpose clearly in the calendar invite so that they know what your goals are from this meeting and what to expect.

E.g.: 

“Discovery: Avoma // Acme”

“Pricing: Avoma <> Acme”

“Kick-off: Avoma // Acme”

2. Put your company name first in the Invite Title

When your prospect or customer is checking their calendar in their app’s weekly view or on their mobile app, the title will get truncated. Since they know their own company’s name, you should make it easier for them to learn they are meeting with whom quickly.

E.g.: 

“Demo: Avoma // Acme” 

“Avoma Demo for Acme”‍

3. Add the meeting medium ("Video” or “Call") in the Invite Title

Make it easier for your prospect or customer to know if it is going to be a video conferencing meeting or an audio call.

If it’s going to be a video conferencing meeting, then they can be prepared on their end to turn ON the video with their appropriate setup ready. Alternatively, if it’s going to be an audio call or you don’t plan to share a screen or video, then the invitees can decide to take that meeting on the go if necessary.

E.g.: 

“Demo (Video): Avoma // Acme”

“Pricing (Call): Avoma <> Acme”

4. Add a brief value proposition in the Invite Title

When you schedule a meeting with a prospect, it could be days or even weeks out. They’re probably busy people, so on the day of the meeting, they may not remember what your company does or what this meeting is about when they look at their calendar.

If the value prop is right there on the calendar event title, they’ll see it multiple times, making it easier for prospects to remember.

E.g.: 

“Demo (Video): Avoma AI Meeting Assistant // Acme”

“Discovery (Call): Avoma Conversation Intelligence <> Acme”

5. Add one-line goal at the top of the Invite Description

The best way to communicate what’s your purpose and desired goal for this meeting is to describe it in one line at the top of the Agenda. That way, everybody knows why they are invited to this meeting and what to expect.

Remember, you might have only talked to one person to schedule a meeting, but they might have invited additional colleagues to join the meeting who may not have any context.

E.g.: 

“Goal: Learn Acme’s initiatives and decide whether to schedule a follow-up Demo meeting.”

6. Add a 3-bullet Agenda in the Invite Description

Add 3-bullet-points to describe the path you will take during the meeting. Bullet points make it easier to structure and organize your agenda, and more importantly, make it easier for someone to read and comprehend your message.

Also, use bold, italics, or underlines for the first word or two of a bulleted list as a way to emphasize a key term or point.

E.g.:

“Agenda:

As discussed, scheduling a video call with the below agenda:

• About Acme: Learn your teams’ workflows, challenges, and initiatives planned
• About Avoma: Overview of our solution
• Next steps: Discuss whether to schedule a personalized demo
  

What else would you like to add/change to the agenda?”

7. Add a list of people from your organization attending the meeting with their LinkedIn profile in the Invite Description

If there are other people from your organization who are going to join, then you should also mention them, so prospects or customers don’t have to research who's in the invite. 

Not only should you mention their names and titles, but also add a link to their LinkedIn profile. It’s completely ok if prospects or customers do not click the link, but in case they do want to check the profile of people who are attending the meeting, you are now making their job a lot easier.

Also, if your prospects see that you have senior leadership on the call, they can get a sense of your commitment, and accordingly, it makes it harder for them to reschedule or cancel the meeting.

E.g.:

“Invited from Avoma:

• Mary L., CEO (Link to LinkedIn profile)
• Joe K., VP of Sales (Link to LinkedIn profile)”
  

8. Add a link to your website or other resources in the Invite Description

Since you're inviting people who may not know what your company does, you can include a link to your website, a video, or a case study to learn more. 

Not everyone will see it, but if they do, it's a great conversation starter because you can ask if they had a chance to click on the link you provided. If they say yes, now you can ask, “What did you like about it?” From there, you can start figuring out what their priorities are or what's on their mind.

9. Add both the conferencing URL and Dial-in Phone Number in the Invite Description

If you use a browser extension from your conference provider to add conferencing details in the invite, the extension will take care of this for you. 

But quite often, people add their meeting URL and don’t add dial-in phone numbers. Some people prefer to dial-in from the phone because they are on-the-go or have bad internet connectivity issues.

10. Add properly formatted one-click Dial-in Phone Numbers in the Invite Description

If you use a browser extension from your conference provider to add conferencing details in the invite, then the extension will take care of this. 

But quite often, people add dial-in phone numbers manually. While adding the phone number, delete all parentheses, dashes, etc. and just keep the phone number. Add two commas and then a meeting passcode or ID, followed by the pound sign (#).

E.g.:

+19291234567,,98765432#

Properly formatted numbers inform the participant’s phone to make a pause to three seconds for each comma, and when it says please enter your conference ID, the phone automatically enters it for your participant.

Research

There are many ways to go about researching participants in advance of your meeting, but you can optimize this research by focusing on a few essential things. A surefire way you can ruin your reputation and credibility is by going into a call cold. People just don’t have the patience to answer basic questions whose answers are readily accessible with the most cursory searching.

You might not have time to research every detail for every meeting, and it’s okay just to review at least a few. The more you personalize your conversation to the participant and their company, the higher the chance that you’ll capture their interest and earn their business.

11. Reserve 10 minutes for research before every meeting

Make sure you reserve at least 10 minutes to get to know the company you’re planning to meet and understand their market and the individuals you’ll be meeting. Not only will this demonstrate your commitment to their cause, but it will also limit any risk of being caught off-guard.

Researching participants is not only relevant when you’re meeting a new prospect, but also highly relevant for current opportunities and existing customers as there are always new people you might be meeting with, or their business may be evolving, and there are new updates that you’re not aware of yet.

12. Read the About section on the company’s website and LinkedIn page

The best way to understand what the company does is to read the About Us page from their website or read the About section on the company’s LinkedIn page.

This information will help you understand how they describe what they do and learn about their mission to map your conversation to their objectives.

13. Take a look at the company’s recent blog posts and press releases

Scroll through their latest blog posts and press releases and see if anything significant has been announced, such as leadership changes, product releases, or customer wins. If they recently had a round of funding, you know they have the budget to buy your solution. Or, if they recruited a new executive, you know who is the decision-maker.

This additional data point will help you understand your participants better and align your conversation related to those recent changes or initiatives they’ve announced.

14. Research participants’ profile on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a gold mine to research your meeting participants. The key things to look for are not only their title and responsibilities at their current job but also their roles from their previous posts. This information will help you gauge their level of authority, interest, and potential questions based on their career history. Is this their first time making this kind of purchasing decision, or have they done this before?

See if there are any shared connections so you can bring it up during your conversation as an ice breaker.

You can also read their recent activity on LinkedIn to see what kind of content they liked or shared, which will inform you what their interests are.

15. Search how to pronounce your participants’ names on YouTube or PronounceNames.com

We live in an increasingly diverse and interconnected world, where people of many different ethnicities and linguistic backgrounds work together. So it's hard to know how to say everyone’s name correctly.

It’s embarrassing when you mispronounce the participant's name. While it bothers them when you mispronounce their name, participants weigh the cost of correcting someone and often decide not to.

While you can always ask them politely, it would still be an awkward situation if you can’t pronounce it correctly even after they’ve explained it to you. Why waste a few minutes of your limited meeting time figuring this out when you could have avoided it in the first place?

It takes less than a minute to do a quick search on YouTube or PronounceNames.com on how to pronounce any name. You could practice it a few times before your meeting, and that way, you don’t have to ask and possibly butcher it during the meeting in front of everyone.

Structure

To run a great remote meeting, it's all about control. With a proper structure for the meeting, you can achieve a better outcome. A little preparation about questions you will ask, how to keep the conversation on track with your agenda, how to wrap up the conversation, so you don’t have to rush in the end, etc., is going to make a run-of-the-mill meeting into a great one.

16. Create Agenda Templates for similar meetings

For every meeting you schedule, you have a purpose and the desired outcome in mind that you hope to achieve at the end of the meeting. Based on the purpose of a meeting, it’s better to prepare a list of questions that you can ask throughout the meeting to learn more about the company’s needs and requirements.

If it’s a Discovery meeting, you have a specific set of questions you want to ask, and if it’s a Feedback meeting, then you have a completely different set of questions.

Instead of thinking about what questions to ask each time right before a meeting starts, create agenda templates for similar types of meetings. This agenda is not something you’d share with a prospect or customer. It’s a “personal” meeting outline helping you stay on message, organized, and perfectly timed. It should be flexible enough to move with the flow of conversation, and firm enough that it keeps you on track.

In the simplest form, you can use any existing note-taking application you like and save these templates so you can copy them before every meeting. Alternatively, you can use services like Avoma, which allows you to insert agenda templates into Avoma’s note-taking application in just one click.

You can also share these templates with your team. With shared templates, you can make sure every single team member asks the same questions in their meetings, bringing consistency into your sales and customer success processes.

17. Collaborate with your manager or colleagues on meeting strategy

Leveraging agenda templates is a must-have tip for every single meeting to save you time but still come across as a well-prepared professional, but you don’t want to make every meeting conversation feel too scripted.

Every prospect or customer is unique in some way. They may have slightly different needs, different organizational structures, different buying processes, or different decision makers for purchasing.

It’s more effective to collaborate with your manager or other colleagues who might have more context about the company or the person you’re meeting with. You can quickly share your meeting agenda structure that you have prepared over Slack or other chat applications and get their feedback if they would like to add or change anything.

Making every meeting agenda contextually personalized will help you look more prepared, confident, and credible.

Presence

There is a famous quote that says 80% of success is “showing up”. What it should truly say is - “showing up professionally”. The most crucial skill for customer-facing professionals is to build rapport and develop trust, and you can better build trust and rapport if you’re mindfully present. Presence is the key to connect authentically and build relationships. 

But developing close and strong relationships can be challenging when you’re communicating virtually. By sharpening your remote presence, you can come across as likable and confident and achieve the same effect as you would in an in-person meeting.

18. Stick to your daily routine

When you’re going to the office and not working remotely, you will typically have a morning routine - wake up, exercise, shower, get dressed, get to the office, get coffee, respond to emails, etc. We are creatures of habit, and having a clear routine gives us structure and enables us to be productive. That's doubly true for remote meetings.

Even when you work remotely and don't have to get into the office by a particular time, it's still essential to have a routine. Without a routine, you will end up losing your work-life balance. You won't have a defined start and end time for the day and may lose track of what activities you are supposed to do before you start and after you finish the day.

19. Wear appropriate professional clothing

I know it can be tempting — especially when you are working remotely — to wear a work shirt and athletic shorts. But what you wear sets the tone of your conversation. You should dress as if you're meeting in-person. You never know if you're going to have to get up suddenly or if your camera might fall.

So wear clean, professional clothing, especially when you’re going to be joining video conferencing calls. What you wear and how you appear on the video is even more crucial when your participants can't see how you walk, physically engage with others, and get a sense of your energy.

20. Make sure your room is well lit, and the light source is behind the camera

Few things are worse than having a professional meeting, and you have backlighting so bright that makes them want to look away or the lighting so dim that their eyes strain to find your face.

Make sure your room is well lit, and the light source is in front of your face and behind the camera and not behind you. Use natural light from windows or use desk lamps, preferably lamps that have multiple brightness levels and color temperatures. With this, your face will be illuminated, and your participants can see your expressions clearly, which will lead to a more engaging and productive conversation.

21. Position your camera angle at the eye level

Weird camera angles can be very distracting and make you look less attractive during video conference meetings. You will typically experience this when you position your camera angle too low i.e., using your laptop camera when the laptop is kept directly on the desk surface. Another example is when you have a dual monitor setup, and your camera is hooked on a different monitor, and you’re looking at another monitor.

Make sure your camera is at eye level, and on the same monitor you plan to use for screen sharing or viewing content. One simple trick is to raise the height of the laptop by either using a laptop stand or a stack of books to bring the laptop’s camera to eye level.

You should move your video window to the top of your screen near the webcam to keep your gaze there.

22. Stay close to the camera, but not too close

Another “don't” about your camera setup is sitting too far from the camera. If you’re using a laptop camera and your laptop is far, your participants are not going to see your face and expressions clearly, and instead, they are going to see a lot of white space and your surroundings.

Make sure you stay closer to the camera and keep only 10-15% of the screen space above your head empty - you should take up the remaining 80-85% of the screen.

23. Keep your surroundings clean and work-appropriate

You don’t want to get on a professional video call and have your participants instantly get distracted by your room’s surroundings. It shouldn’t be too personal (dishes, dirty clothes, bedsheets) or too bare (an empty white wall) either. 

It's ok to have some personal effects behind you, but also make a statement that it’s your workspace. Your wall art or decorations should be work-appropriate, and your surroundings should be clean. A bookcase, lightly adorned shelves, or house plants work best. An empty white wall is still better than something unattractive, like a mess of wires. Also, make sure there are no moving objects like ceiling fans, etc.

A clean space also includes your desk! Avoid having multiple coffee mugs, dishes, and trash on the surface.

24. Use virtual backgrounds

If for some reason, you find yourself in a position with a messy background of toys and dirty clothes, or you’re not at your dedicated workspace at home, then there is an alternative option to look professional.

If your company uses Zoom for video conferencing, then Zoom’s virtual background functionality lets you use a still image or a video in the background and hide your real surroundings.

Zoom also lets you upload a custom background image. If you have extra time and if it’s your dream opportunity, then you can create a custom background with the logo of the company you're trying to sell into. It's a chance for you to show that you’re on their team as a partner, and you care about their business. It's a small thing, but it could create a very positive impression.

25. Minimize or eliminate external interference

Avoid pets, kids, spouses, friends, or anything else that would interfere with your meeting. Of course, it can’t always be avoided and can also be cute, so it’s completely fine to be authentic about your situation and even humanize the interruption by talking about it.

But it’s preferable to avoid these situations as it risks derailing a train of thought or undercuts a moment. If your office or room has a door you can close, consider adding a sign indicating to others that you are in a meeting.

Connectivity

Having reliable connectivity is a critical component in making remote meetings flawless and successful. Ensuring you have the proper technology and infrastructure to run remote meetings is essential. It can be frustrating for everyone involved if all of a sudden, your computer freezes, or your internet crashes, and your call is disconnected.

26. Test your Wi-Fi for better connectivity

Testing Wi-Fi connectivity speed is the most important rule, but also the most ignored. Your connection may seem fine for web browsing, but that task uses a lot less network bandwidth than a video call. Most web conferencing providers suggest 1 to 2.5 Mbps bandwidth for upload and 2 to 8 Mbps bandwidth for download for group video calls (a call with three to seven people). You can use Speedtest.net, to see how fast your network is.

If your connection isn’t fast enough, try getting closer to your router and try different rooms to see if interference from other Wi-Fi networks or other devices is a problem.

If your router supports two frequencies, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, try switching between them and running speed tests on each. The 5 GHz channel can be faster but has a shorter range; 2.4 GHz generally offers better reception over longer distances.

27. Have a Plan B with mobile hotspot ready

There's always a chance that the WiFi will fail right before your meeting starts. That feeling of panic is never a good one. Thankfully, most smartphones can turn into mobile hotspots. Keep in mind that it may add to your data usage and cost you extra.

28. Open web pages to be shared ahead of time

If you also know in advance that you may have connectivity issues, then it’s better to be prepared in advance than trying to risk it during a meeting. 

If you already know you’re going to present specific web pages from your software, or say there's one function of your software that takes a few moments to load, the best thing is to preload it in another tab or window.

Another tip is to be prepared and share some customer stories or ask some questions related to the information you’re planning to share. By the time you complete that conversation, the page would be loaded in the background, and people would not be staring at the blank screen with a loading icon.

29. Test your Audio and Video settings

Test your microphone before you video call, especially if it's an important meeting. Nothing is worse than trying to share something critical and not being able to communicate clearly because your audio clarity and volume are poor.

Most web-conferencing softwares have proper default settings, and they allow you to test sound and video quality before joining a meeting. Take advantage of that capability so you can work out any kinks in the system.

30. Use good-quality headphones and microphones

Yes, your computer has speakers, a microphone, and likely some level of echo cancellation to prevent feedback, but the sound quality will be far better for everyone involved if you don’t use the built-in microphone and speakers on your laptop. 

Instead, invest in a good-quality pair of headphones and an external microphone. Participating in meetings as a remote worker is hard enough as you try to determine who is speaking and keep track of multiple conversation threads. Don’t make it worse by using inadequate audio equipment.

31. Use Mute as much as possible

Background noise can be incredibly distracting and disruptive to meetings. It could be a dog barking, someone talking in the background, or something as simple as someone typing on their keyboard. Whatever it is, it can impair the ability of participants to hear the active speaker. 

A common reason people object to using mute is that they often don't remember to unmute when talking. However, if they use mute regularly, they will get used to unmuting and may conferencing solutions have keyboard shortcuts to quickly mute / unmute.

32. Turn-off your computer sounds and distracting notifications

The best practice is to mute your microphone whenever others are presenting to silence any overwhelming background noise.

Also, turn off your notifications and sounds for emails, calendar, Slack, Text messages, or Calls, especially if you're sharing your screen with the group. It's super distracting for everyone else in the meeting to see pop-ups on your screen while trying to take in the information you're presenting, but more importantly, you don’t want potentially private messages or confidential information to be displayed accidentally to everyone on the call.

33. Use background noise filtering apps

If for some reason, you cannot avoid background noise or sound, then install some third-party noise-canceling applications like Krisp.ai on your laptop. It provides noise cancellation and room echo removal functionality, which allows people to work from anywhere. It adds a layer between your physical microphone/speaker and conferencing apps, which doesn’t let any noise pass through.

34. Close applications that are not required for a meeting

For web conferencing providers, the two most precious resources for a reliable conferencing call are processor power and network bandwidth. To engage in the smoothest possible meetings, close all applications you don’t need to use for the meeting itself. It’s that simple.

35. Close or manage other tabs that are not required for a meeting

When you're sharing a screen, your primary goal is to show software or information from your computer. Unfortunately, your participants may instead focus on all the tabs you have open and all the bookmarks you have in your browser.

Ideally, you should close all the tabs in your browser before you join a meeting and only keep the required tabs open.

However, that can be a frustrating experience to close all the tabs just before a meeting only to reopen them again after the meeting is over. A solution for this problem could be to use a browser extension like Workona to manage your tabs. It will keep your tabs and memory under control with tab management.

36. Join the meeting a few minutes early

Whether you're hosting the meeting or just attending it, don't waste valuable time joining the meeting or troubleshooting if something goes wrong. Instead, plan for at least a couple minutes of set-up time ahead of schedule whenever possible.

Inevitably, remote meetings start late because attendees are not ready at the start time. Give yourself time to get your headset plugged in, audio configured, video working, and your background and camera setup properly.

Make it a habit to dial or go online at least a few minutes early, so you can set up in advance or fall back to plan B.

Chapter 2: The Engagement Routine

To run a great remote meeting, it's all about control. The way that you start means everything because first impressions will last you throughout the rest of the meeting. 

In this chapter, we're going to take it from what happens as soon as the first participant joins the meeting, how to open it strongly, keep the discussion lively, and end it memorably.

The Beginning

Before you start a remote meeting, there are certain best practices that you should follow and be ready for prime time, which will help you not only be more effective in the conversation but also be more efficient. Follow these routines at the beginning of every remote meeting.

37. Always turn your Video ON

Communication is the most crucial part of sales and customer meetings, and a lot of communication is non-verbal. Much of what you are saying and what participants are saying is never said at all!

Don’t you want to see a nod of approval when you mention a feature or the raise of their eyebrows when you mention the price? You can’t do that over the phone.

That’s why video meetings are better than traditional phone calls or audio-only meetings. When other people see your face, they are more likely to empathize with you and listen to you. When you see their face, you can more easily gauge their reactions and interests. Video helps people connect as individuals and build trust.

At Avoma, we analyzed more than 200,000 sales and customer success meetings using our AI-based technology. And we learned that meetings, where everyone kept their videos on through all meetings, had the highest win and engagement rates.

38. Be the first one to turn your Video ON and keep it ON even if others don’t

Understandably, that you might be shy and reluctant to switch to video because you’re working from home and don’t have a good set up, or maybe you've got a bad hair day, or you worry about a poor internet connection. But as we shared in the Presence and Connectivity sections in Chapter 1, if you spend a few minutes before your meeting, you should be able to address these concerns.

The first thing is - always be the first one to turn your Video ON. Be the person who sets a precedent. If you turn your Video ON, you can expect other participants will also turn their Video on. If you don’t turn it on by default, then your participants will likely leave it off since they will feel exposed if you can see them, but they can’t see you.

Another thing - even if you turn your video on, there is a high chance that other participants will leave theirs off. By seeing that they didn’t turn the video ON, most people will turn their video OFF too. Don’t make this mistake. While you don’t have an opportunity to see participants' reactions, at least they can see your reaction, excitement, and enthusiasm.

39. Keep it authentic during interruptions in a Video meeting

Even though you try your best to minimize or eliminate external interference in your remote meeting workspace, there are going to be instances where your pet, kids, or spouse will show up in front of the camera during a meeting.

Instead of reacting negatively to such situations and derailing a train of thought completely, the best approach would be to be authentic and humanize the interruption by talking about them or introducing them.

40. Record all your meetings

The moment you hang up your meeting, the conversation you just had is lost unless somebody was taking very detailed notes. People always have a good understanding of the gist of the conversation - it’s when you ask them to share specific details, that’s when they struggle. 

And that’s when they wish they could go back and listen to the meeting again and recover a few details they missed. Recording your meeting can take the pressure off of remembering the specifics your participants mentioned during the meeting. 

Recordings also become a reliable source of truth for what was decided at the meeting and to keep everyone in the loop, even if they could not attend.

Most of the popular web conferencing solutions out there have some recording functionality. If you want to make it hassle-free and record most of your meetings automatically across all web conferencing solutions, organize those recordings based on calendar events, customers, and team members, and make it easily searchable across your organization, then you can also consider using advanced solutions like Avoma.

Opening

For better or worse, we humans make judgments about a person in the first seven seconds of an initial encounter. Given this brief window of opportunity, it is critical for sales and customer success professionals not to leave anything to chance when they start customer conversations. In addition to using their knowledge, confidence, and energy, they also need to plan how they will open their meeting to capture a customer’s interest. Here are some best practices for effectively opening a sales or customer meeting.

41. Have relevant small talk

Simply joining a meeting and jumping into your agenda is a bit jarring. A bit of small talk is necessary to warm up the relationship between you and the prospect and set a friendly tone for the meeting. When you’re meeting someone for the first time, the first couple of minutes can be a little bit awkward. 

Inquiring about their weekend or the weather is probably not a good idea. While these are tried and true topics, everyone asks them. Instead, you can talk to them about something their company announced, or their recent activity on LinkedIn and compliment them on it. The intent behind this is to show that you're interested in their company, that you've done your research, and to help them feel comfortable as soon as they join.

The worst thing that you can do is say something like “let's wait for everybody to join” as no one likes sitting in silence or, even worse, they open up their email or Slack. Now they're already disengaged right from the get-go. So instead, have a conversation that has something loosely related to them.

42. Have people introduce themselves

Once all the participants have joined the call, the first thing to do is make sure that you know everybody's name. Identify yourself when you start speaking and then request everyone else to introduce themselves as well so you can put faces to the names. Knowing their names comes in handy when they ask questions - you can answer them by referring their name.

43. Appreciate participants for joining the meeting

Once everyone introduces themselves, take a few seconds before you start your agenda and acknowledge people for their time. By showing this gratitude, not only will participants notice and appreciate it, but will also they bring their very best to your meeting and help make the time more productive and enjoyable.

44. Confirm their time availability

The next step is to check their time. You want to know if they are still available for the scheduled time or are there any participants who need to leave early. 

To run a productive meeting, you have run it as per your plan. If you already started on time, then all you have to do is confirm the end time.

The reason this is important is that a lot of executives have back to back meetings. If you're reserving the last five minutes to schedule the next steps and they have to leave earlier, you're now stuck with going back and forth by email. That might lose some momentum, so instead, verify when they have to leave at the very beginning.

45. Align everybody on the purpose and the end goal

And finally, in one sentence, make sure everybody's aligned on what is the end goal of this meeting, What's the purpose of the meeting? What are they going to accomplish at the end of the meeting?

The key is to say the goal from the perspective of those you are meeting with. Show it's about them, not about you.

46. Share your Agenda

The next phase is to share the agenda, which is what you already have in the calendar invite – three bullet points. Even if you've already sent the Agenda in the invite, you have to assume that some participants may not have not read it before joining the meeting.

It’s your goal to make sure everyone is on the same page, so set the context by going over your agenda at the very beginning.

47. Ask for participants’ input on the Agenda

Once you share your agenda, always make sure to ask - “What else would you like to cover today?” That’s an open-ended question. 

If you instead ask - “Anything that you want to add to that?” - that's a closed-ended question where they can simply say yes or no. If they say yes, you can learn more, but if they say no, you missed the opportunity to uncover their goals.

By asking an open-ended question, you can learn what’s on top of their mind as a priority.

Engagement

There isn’t a one size fits all approach to meeting with customers. But you can’t consistently get good results if you aren’t engaging with your customers in ways that matter to them. One thing that sets the more experienced professionals apart from the amateurs is that they genuinely understand how to engage with customers instead of going through a call script. Try using some of the tips highlighted here to make your conversations more engaging.

48. Stay 100% focused

It's no secret that people get distracted in audio conference calls, and it happens in video calls as well. But you need to set an example from your end by giving 100% of your attention. It goes both ways, and hopefully, they will notice it and reciprocate. Avoid any distractions by putting your phone away, closing your browser, etc. and giving your full attention.

49. Actively listen to participants

The truth is, listening to what participants are saying can be difficult. Too often, you are waiting for a turn to talk or thinking about what to say next instead of truly listening. You end up missing the opportunity to build rapport, uncovering their true needs, and giving them confidence that you understood their world.

Instead of following your script rigidly, you need to be adaptable and listen to their words, feelings, tone, facial expressions, and body language. By observing these clues and understanding their words, you need to comprehend what they’re saying. To fully comprehend what they’re saying, you should try to put yourself in their position and internalize their reality.

50. Confirm with participants that you heard them correctly

The next step is to retain the specific details in the conversation and acknowledge that you understood what they said by paraphrasing what they said into something more concise. This makes a huge difference by encouraging prospects to open up more and increasing trust and commitment.

51. Ask a relevant follow-up question to clarify your understanding further

After you’ve confirmed that you understand the prospect, your next step is to ask a relevant follow-up question. 

You should ask open-ended questions that encourage your prospect to express what they think in their own words. If you ask the right question, participants might come to the right conclusions themselves by emphasizing their problems, sharing its impact on their business, and describing what solution they’re looking for to solve those problems.

52. Add pauses and time for questions

Make sure you give your participants plenty of time to contribute to the conversation. After you cover a topic, pause and ask if participants have any questions. Typically 3-4 seconds pauses are good. You might be surprised at what that extra time to think yields from your participants.

Sometimes it’s also a good practice to make sure this meeting is progressing per their expectations.

53. Ask questions to specific people instead of to a group

Now there is a risk of asking a question to the entire group as it might end up in silence - everyone expects someone else to jump in. So the way to avoid this awkward situation and control the momentum is to address specific people and ask them questions.

But there is also a risk when you ask a question to someone specific; they might not be prepared. So the first step is to start with the participant's name. Then provide the context of what you were just talking about, thus even if that person was distracted, you're helping them and not putting them on the spot.

Also, make sure that you don't just refer to the same person every single time you have a question. Try to rotate through the entire group and make sure everyone is involved.

54. Interrupt politely to keep your agenda on track

Keeping your agenda on track and on time is tough, especially when running a remote meeting. While you try to keep the meeting on time, you also don’t want to come across as a pushy professional that only cares about themselves. Sometimes when a customer goes on and on, it can still be valuable.

So before you get started, roughly plan how long you expect to spend on each section. Also, keep some wiggle room based on priorities and try to cover the top priority agenda items first in case someone does ramble a bit.

But how do you politely interrupt somebody if they're going on and on?

One approach is to find out something that they said and use that to guide them back. With this approach, you still give the control back to the person, but you're redirecting them to the thing you want them to be speaking about.

The other thing that you can do is set up expectations right from the get-go that says, “We have a lot to cover today. But for us to get through everything, I might interrupt to make sure that we end on time. Does that sound fair?” Once you have that agreement at the very beginning, it's much easier when it comes time to interrupt.

55. Share your screen to convey your message visually

The written and spoken language is, obviously, great, but there are a lot of people who learn faster with visual communication. For these visual learners, it can take longer to try to explain a concept just through verbal communication, as this presents a potential for miscommunication.

These people learn best when they see things first hand compared to hearing what you say. They need something visual to engage their brain and help them retain information. This makes sharing your screen and explaining the information with visual cues a vital step in customer-facing conversations.

56. Take only brief notes

“I love taking notes”, said no one ever. There are very few people who furiously take meeting notes and can still pay attention, but the majority of people can’t multitask. If they’re taking notes, then they’re not actively listening to what participants are saying.

The best way to address this issue is to stop taking the detailed notes during the meeting and make sure you record all meetings. You should only take brief notes to refer back to that information during the meeting itself.

If you use advanced note-taking applications like Avoma, you could get the benefit of having your brief notes being automatically linked to the actual recording and transcript at that time, so you can go back and revisit the details.

57. Smile on the Video

When you're on camera, people will mirror what your enthusiasm is, and they will reflect it. So make sure you smile and show you’re excited. If you sound like you're not excited to be there, people will start mirroring that behavior as well. 

It’s quite common that you get maximum audience participation when you are meeting in-person, but you have to be extra prepared and disciplined about these techniques when you're running these meetings remotely.

Ending

Many meetings fail to achieve their desired objectives because people don’t plan the end properly. Managing meeting time is critical to keep the meetings effective. One of the main differences between an amateur and a professional is how they control the meeting time.

A professional will complete the meeting within the agreed-upon time. An amateur will apologize for going over time until participants cut them off. You need to be diligent about monitoring the time and try to end punctually, or better yet, a little early. The sooner you complete what you want to cover, the more time you can spend on talking about specific next steps.

Here are some tips for planning a proper ending for your meetings, and help everyone make the most out of their time.

58. Give a closing warning

As you are getting closer to the end time, you should let people know you are wrapping up in a few minutes and ask, “What questions can I answer before we get to the end?”. This allows participants to ask any last questions they have in mind.

59. Confirm if you achieved the end goal

As you’re getting closer towards the end, you should go back to what was the end goal you had planned in the beginning and had communicated to your participants.

You should simply ask them if they achieved the goal that was discussed at the beginning. Your participants might simply say yes or no. If it's a little objection, you have a few more minutes to handle it. If they say yes, then you can start scheduling the next steps.

60. Agree on the next steps

Never end a meeting without a final decision on what needs to happen next. Leaving a meeting without making any decision or getting a firm and clear commitment means your meeting was a failure.

For a conversation to move forward, specific commitments must be made. So take a few minutes to summarize stating what you will do by when and asking others to do the same.

61. Schedule your follow-up meeting at the moment

Don't end your meeting without scheduling your next meeting. Make the most of having your participants actively engaged by asking for their calendar availability at that moment.

62. Appreciate the people for their time and contribution

In the end, acknowledge and thank people for their time and their contributions to the conversation. People rarely state the value created by a conversation and therefore lose an excellent opportunity to validate both the conversation and the individuals in it.

Chapter 3: The Collaborative Follow-Through Routine

When you're relying on a variety of remote tools, things can get lost in the shuffle. This causes you to fail to meet a commitment you’ve made and miss the important customer feedback as soon as the meeting is over.

In this chapter, we're going to discuss how to capture important customer information more efficiently, follow up with meeting participants promptly, and how to share the voice of the customer consistently with other stakeholders in your company.

Note-Taking

Sales and Customer Success conversations are goldmines for customer knowledge, but that information is lost unless someone is actually spending hours taking detailed notes, collating these insights, and then sharing those within the organization. Follow these smart tips to take detailed notes without spending too much time.

63. Capture detailed meeting notes with the smart way and not the hard way

The most common challenge with taking detailed notes are - you can’t take them during the meeting while paying attention to the conversation, and you often don’t remember the details after the meeting.

As mentioned before, the smart way of capturing important customer information is - leverage advanced note-taking applications like Avoma, which links your manually typed brief notes during the meeting to the recording and transcript of actual conversation. It helps you to go back and listen to the recording or read the transcript to get the full context.

Solutions like Avoma also helps by automatically extracting brief notes for key topics using AI and appending to your notes. This comes very handily when you couldn’t (or don’t like to) take any notes during the meeting.

AI assistants will never be able to take 100% of the comprehensive notes. That’s why Avoma also offers Augmented Notes functionality so you can simply highlight the text in the Transcript, and add it to your notes and organize it with well-defined categories.

With the best blend of Human Intelligence (i.e. you) and Artificial Intelligence, you can ensure to capture important customer information.

64. Save notes and customer information into CRM promptly

Most of the time, closing a deal or onboarding a customer can be very long, taking weeks or even months. With multiple meetings and calls, keeping all notes updated in your CRM ensures that you'll always be able to find the crucial information when you need to.

So always make sure to save your notes and customer information to CRM promptly before you forget about it (preferred by the end of the day). As when you meet with so many different people in any given week, the chances are very high that you will not remember the specifics of each conversation or mix-up things after a few days.

Another smarter approach is to leverage solutions like Avoma, where AI-generated notes for key topics are automatically captured and saved into CRM for appropriate records as soon as the meeting is over. This ensures you always capture key customer information in CRM on time.

Follow-Up

Meeting with your prospect or customer is only half the battle. The real work starts after the meeting is over. That’s the time to take the trust you’ve developed from your meeting and turn it into a long-term business relationship. Here are some tips to help you with your meeting follow up effectively and prevent opportunities from falling through the crack.

65. Create follow-up email draft using templates for different types of meetings

If you’re going to invest 30-60 minutes in meeting with someone, it’s most effective to send a follow-up email, however brief it is. A lot of the time, the difference between winning and losing is someone who took the small extra steps.

This probably isn’t the first time you’ve thought or tried sending follow-up emails. There is always something that happens; a crisis arises, and, as a result, you forget to send follow-up emails.

Here’s a quick tip to make it easier to send follow-up emails even if a crisis arises: create follow-up email templates for different types of meetings and create a draft email using these templates as soon as the meeting is over.

66. Send a readable follow-up email to participants

Once you have a draft template available with some structure available, filling in a few details becomes a lot easier, and more importantly, it doesn’t take a lot of cognitive bandwidth to think about what you should write from scratch.

As a general guideline, less is more. Adding a few details in the email is good enough. The goal is not to repeat every single detail that’s discussed in the meeting. They attended that meeting, so writing a super long detailed email is overkill. The longer your email, the less likely the recipient is to read and act on it.

Make sure to have short sentences and short paragraphs and lots of bullet points and bold things you want to emphasize.

Just thank people for their time and effort, summarize any key points covered or discussed during the meeting, list down key action items and their due dates, and attach or link any relevant resources and documents that you promised during the meeting.

Collaboration

The difference between successful and unsuccessful businesses is that successful ones understand their customers better, and their customers understand these businesses better. One of the techniques to understand your customers better is to capture the voice of the customer. And to help customers understand your business better is to communicate accurate information promptly.

67. Get help from Product and Marketing teams to close deals faster

As your solutions are getting more comprehensive, a single salesperson rarely closes a deal on their own. Quite often, they have to get help from others from their team, and sometimes even from cross-functional teams like Product and Marketing.

Top professionals get others to collaborate on their deals sooner than later so they can promptly provide accurate information to the prospect and keep the momentum going.

They might want the marketing team to provide custom content that clarifies a prospect's specific objection or use case. Or they want the product team to share timelines for a particular feature that the customer wants.

But manually writing these requirements and going back and forth over email is a very cumbersome process. Plus, when you share those requirements, you also add your subjective bias in terms of how you understood that requirement versus what the customer wants.

But there is a smarter approach. Advanced solutions like Avoma provide an intuitive experience to create short recording Snippets (clips) from your meetings in seconds and share it with your team instantly.

Now your team doesn’t have to listen to the whole 30-45 mins long meetings with irrelevant details. They can quickly understand the customer's requirements first-hand in less than a few minutes and provide an appropriate response.

68. Share customer feedback with Product and Marketing promptly

Product and Marketing teams would usually get first-hand customer feedback through surveys, arranging 1:1 interviews with customers, usability testing, etc. But these inputs are collected in a controlled context. The best way to learn prospects’ real objections or customers’ real issues is to listen to the sales and customer success meetings.

You can play an instrumental role in passing valuable customer feedback to your Product and Marketing team promptly so they can build the product that people want and improve the messaging to market it successfully.

But you don’t get paid for sharing feedback. You get paid for closing deals and renewing customers. Especially when sharing customer feedback is a very cumbersome process. You would do it once or twice and eventually would give up.

But as shared in the previous tip, there is a smarter approach to use advanced solutions like Avoma to create short recording Snippets (clips) from your meetings in seconds and share it with your team instantly.

Now your team can quickly understand the real voice of the customer in less than a few minutes and build customer-driven products and market positioning.

69. Get feedback from your manager for coaching and strategy

Top professionals have a growth mindset and seek to get both strategic and tactical advice on their deals and get coached by their managers. 

Historically a manager was expected to shadow their team’s every single meeting and coach accordingly. But the reality is, that’s just too time-consuming and unscalable. And then the manager ends up cherry-picking a few meetings but is never 100% sure what happened in the rest of the meetings.

One of the ways to help managers is to share some parts of the conversations where you think you struggled in the conversation or were thrown off the guard. As mentioned in the previous tip, instead of asking your manager to listen to the entire recording, you can simply share a short recording Snippet and request your manager to provide coaching feedback. 

By making it a lot more efficient to listen to specific parts of your meeting, you ensure your manager provides actionable feedback instantly.

Self-Improvement

One of the big mistakes you can make as a professional is to believe that coaching and training are the responsibility of your manager or employer. While they need to invest in you in developing and refining your skills, the responsibility for growth rests fundamentally with you. Continuous self-improvement is a choice, and you can take meaningful, positive action towards your personal and professional growth. Here are some of the best practices practiced by top professionals.

70. Listen to your meeting recordings to improve your performance

One of the habits of top-performing professionals is they take charge of their coaching. They spend more time listening to their meetings compared to their team members so they can get better. They listen to their calls to prepare for their next meeting or analyze what went right or wrong, and accordingly improve their skill.

Listening to your conversation and learning how you carried yourselves in a meeting is eye-opening. Reviewing your recorded meeting gives you a chance to review how you handled yourself when a prospect asked a question or shared an objection. It will help you identify areas of improvement in your product knowledge, refinement in your communication, improvement in your sales skills, etc.

71. Listen to your peers’ meeting recordings to learn what they’re doing well

As humans, we rise to the level of the company that we keep. Top reps know this very well and have achieved the success by not analyzing their performance, but by observing and learning from other top performers. 

Every team has top performers who consistently crush quota, as well as those who are always striving (or struggling) to be better. By listening to “A” players’ recordings, it will enable “B” players to see how top performers open the conversation, handle objections, answer questions concisely, control the conversation, and set the desired next steps.

The best professionals maintain a high level of performance because they never stop learning. Listening to your peers’ recordings is the easiest and fastest way to hone your skills and achieve sales mastery.

Advanced conversation intelligence solutions like Avoma also help you search and find top player’s relevant meetings, understand what are what topics they cover in which stages, how much time they spend on each topic, how much they talk vs. listen, what kinds of questions they ask, etc. You can leverage this information to learn what to do more and what to do less.

72. Step outside and recharge yourself

When the line between “work” and “home” starts to blur, you might find yourself stuck to your computer screen for an extended period and realize that you haven’t been outside in 2 days. While that can sometimes be necessary when closing a major deal or resolving a priority issue for a customer, develop a habit of setting a time when you officially “log off” for the day.

You should consider taking a quick walk around your block or step outside in your backyard or balcony for a bit of fresh air and sunshine in between back to back meetings. Commit to your fitness routine and make sure that you’re creating blocks in your schedule to eat healthily and take breaks so that you can be more productive during important meetings.

Final Thoughts

The Future of Remote Meetings

All of us have a love and hate relationship with meetings. When run effectively, people collaborate on great ideas, achieve alignment, and ultimately make faster progress on their desired goals. But when run poorly, valuable time is wasted, information discussed is lost and scattered across multiple tools, desired goals are not achieved, and in the end, people blame each other.

The reality is, a majority of meetings are still run very poorly today. And the customer-facing teams feel the pain of inefficient and ineffective meetings the highest and most frequently.

On the efficiency front, just to have one conversation with a prospect, a typical Salesperson will juggle between 5-6 different tools for 50+ times a month. There is so much inefficiency, context switching, and information loss across all these tools and in each conversation.

And on the effectiveness front, it is even worse because, for the rest of the organization, these conversations are a black box. They have no visibility in terms of what’s going on in these meetings. They are not aware of what are the common objections and feature requests prospects and customers are making. They don’t know how Salespeople are handling these objections and what the top performers doing well that rest are not doing.

Video conferencing has already transformed remote meetings. Not only can Sales and Customer Success professionals increase cost-efficiency by connecting with more prospects in less time, but they can also use the face-to-face component to build rapport, trust, and accelerate their sales and customer success cycles.

But in the future, I believe, with the right blend of Human Intelligence (you and your colleagues) and advancements in Artificial Intelligence, remote meetings can be 10x more productive and valuable compared to in-person meetings.

A comprehensive AI meeting assistant will make customer-facing teams 10x more efficient and will automate their low-value tasks and augment the high-value tasks. At the same time, with actionable intelligence across all conversations will help them to be 10x more effective.

Sincerely,

Aditya Kothadiya

P.S: One last thing. I would love to hear from you. Email me at aditya@avoma.com with what you thought of this book. I’ll release a version two some day and the only way it will be better than this version is if I hear from you.

About Avoma

Avoma was founded in late 2017 to provide the most comprehensive AI meeting assistant for the customer-facing reps and conversation intelligence platform for managers and leaders.

It automatically records, transcribes, and analyzes all customer-facing conversations (meetings, calls, etc.) to extract summarized notes, identifies speakers and key topics discussed, and saves key information to appropriate records in CRM.

Ultimately, Avoma’s mission is to help customer-facing teams to achieve their desired outcomes faster — by making their meetings 10x more productive and helping them to extract 10x more value from their conversations.

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72 Actionable Tips

The Preparation Routine (before the meeting)

Calendar Invite

1. Add a one-word purpose statement in the Invite Title
2. Put your company name first in the Invite Title
3. Add the meeting medium ("Video” or “Call") in the Invite Title
4. Add a brief value proposition in the Invite Title
5. Add one-line goal at the top of the Invite Description
6. Add a 3-bullet Agenda in the Invite Description
7. Add a list of people from your organization attending the meeting with their LinkedIn profile in the Invite Description
8. Add a link to your website or other resources in the Invite Description
9. Add both the conferencing URL and Dial-in Phone Number in the Invite Description
10. Add properly formatted one-click Dial-in Phone Numbers in the Invite Description

Research

11. Reserve 10 minutes for research before every meeting
12. Read the About section on the company’s website and LinkedIn page
13. Take a look at the company’s recent blog posts and press releases
14. Research participants’ profile on LinkedIn
15. Search how to pronounce your participants’ names on YouTube

Structure

16. Create Agenda Templates for similar meetings
17. Collaborate with your manager or colleagues on meeting strategy

Presence

18. Stick to your daily routine
19. Wear appropriate professional clothing
20. Make sure your room is well lit, and the light source is behind the camera
21. Position your camera angle at the eye level
22. Stay close to the camera, but not too close
23. Keep your surroundings clean and work-appropriate
24. Use virtual backgrounds
25. Minimize or eliminate external interference

Connectivity

26. Test your Wi-Fi for better connectivity
27. Have a Plan B with mobile hotspot ready
28. Open web pages to be shared ahead of time
29. Test your Audio and Video settings
30. Use good-quality headphones and microphones
31. Use Mute as much as possible
32. Turn-off your computer sounds and distracting notifications
33. Use background noise filtering apps
34. Close applications that are not required for a meeting
35. Close or manage other tabs that are not required for a meeting
36. Join the meeting a few minutes early

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The Engagement Routine (during the meeting)

Beginning

37. Always turn your Video ON
38. Be the first one to turn your Video ON and keep it ON even if others don’t
39. Keep it authentic during interruptions in a Video meeting
40. Record your all meetings

Opening

41. Have relevant small talk
42. Have people introduce themselves
43. Appreciate participants for joining the meeting
44. Confirm their time availability
45. Align everybody on the purpose and the end goal
46. Share your Agenda
47. Ask for participants’ input on the Agenda

Engagement

48. Stay 100% focused
49. Actively listen to participants
50. Confirm with participants that you heard them correctly
51. Ask a relevant follow-up question to clarify your understanding further
52. Add pauses and time for questions
53. Ask questions to specific people instead of to a group
54. Interrupt politely to keep your agenda on track
55. Share your screen to convey your message visually
56. Take only brief notes
57. Smile on the Video

Ending

58. Give a closing warning
59. Confirm if you achieved the end goal
60. Agree on the next steps
61. Schedule your follow-up meeting at the moment
62. Appreciate the people for their time and contribution

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The Follow-through Collaboration Routine (after the meeting)

Note-Taking

63. Capture detailed meeting notes with the smart way and not the hard way
64. Save notes and customer information into CRM promptly

Follow-Up

65. Create follow-up email draft using templates for different types of meetings
66. Send a readable follow-up email to participants

Collaboration

67. Get help from Product and Marketing teams to close deals faster
68. Share customer feedback with Product and Marketing promptly
69. Get feedback from your manager for coaching and strategy

Self-Improvement

70. Listen to your meeting recordings to improve your performance
71. Listen to your peers’ meeting recordings to learn what they’re doing well
72. Step outside and recharge yourself