Total Recall

Looking back at what just happened in your sales meeting

If you run a company, or you are under one, meetings are always a given. Sales meetings are usually conducted 4-5 times a week, and each one takes an average of about one hour. On top of that, sales reps spend an average of 94.4 communicative daily activities such as sending emails, taking calls, leaving voicemails, and responding to social media. These activities generate communication and end up in about 14.1 meaningful conversations per day. Now, what does all of this data imply? It means that salespeople, or even leaders, get involved in a whirlwind of meetings every day.

Meetings are good for an organization’s development. It is a way for executives and managers to communicate objectives, motivate, and give updates. However, with so many meetings, interactions, and information day after day, it can be very hard to keep track and remember the things discussed, thus affecting work outcomes and the data entered into your company’s CRM. Meetings are only as good as what people do with the information communicated from them. The data is what counts.

From a Salesperson’s Perspective

Imagine a sales rep attending an internal sales meeting in the morning. They try to type in notes on their Macbook, and as the meeting goes on, from time to time they would say: “Sorry, I didn’t catch that, can you tell us again?” Later on, they take phone calls, go out and talk to clients, close sales, and discuss updates with their manager.

The sales rep gets home, opens their CRM, and realizes that they need to recall something from the meeting earlier. They check their notes, and it looks like a mess of words. When was the deadline again? Who were the contact persons? What task needs to be done tomorrow? After a busy day, the typical salesperson will forget at least 30% of what happens in a meeting, affecting data inputs and the retention of important information, thus affecting the quality of their CRM data entries.

Forgetting is Normal

Not being able to remember things 100% is normal. Neuroscientists say that because of the multiple sensory inputs your brain gets every second, it needs to forget unnecessary things to zone in, and let you focus. The same goes for memory.

According to the forgetting curve, after an hour, people generally forget 50% of the information, and this percentage gets bigger as more time passes by. The problem is that important information may be forgotten along with the others, but don’t beat up yourself, or your salespeople for forgetting things. It is simply our brain’s adaptive and evolutionary feature.

In short, it is very unlikely to be able to look back at what just happened in your sales meeting, and remember everything.

What we need to do is to find an efficient countermeasure, one that doesn’t have to rely on our memory or ability to recall, because as we all know, it’s not very reliable.

What are these countermeasures?

Taking notes manually

The classic “note-taking” has been around for many years. It may be manually writing down with pen and paper or typing on a keyboard. Generally, leaders encourage their employees to “take note”, but is this the best countermeasure to retain data?

In the context of a sales meeting, taking notes will not be enough to catch up with the information being presented. It has been proven that speaking is significantly faster than typing or writing on paper. Oftentimes the “Pardon me, can you repeat that?”, a sentence that seems to frequently arise during meetings, happens not because they couldn’t hear you, but because they are trying to take note of the information. Besides that, taking notes comes with the risk of not being able to listen, nor actively participate, which is the entire point of having a meeting in the first place.

Simply put, manual note-taking is possible, but if you want complete, accurate, and thorough data, it may not be the best solution for you and your team.

Recording the meeting

Recording the entire meeting is also an option, either a video or an audio recording would work. This is a great way of capturing an entire meeting, and everything that was said in it, ensuring the wholeness of information. The recording can also be used to create a transcription, which can be useful for reports or meeting minutes.

However, the problem with this is the filtering of important data. A recording is a raw and full capture of information, it’s not organized nor outlined to show the most important things. It may be complete, but it doesn’t highlight any meaningful data. If the meeting is 45 minutes long, then you’ll have to skim through a 45-minute long footage of the meeting, to look for a particular detail or information. This process is inefficient and will take even more time and effort.

Using Voice to CRM

At the end of the day, most of the data within a company will be stored in their respective Customer Relationship Management(CRM) software. This includes meeting notes and information. Employees and users will have to input data into the software for it to be useful because after all, a CRM runs on its data. When Salesforce conceived Einstein Voice, this was one of the things that they wanted to help sales people on. Although it did not came to actual fruition, companies like Hey DAN was able to catch on and started integrating Artificial Intelligence into their ever efficient next day crm data entry service.

With Voice to CRM, data capture is almost effortless. There’s no need for a 100% total recall of the meeting(it’s physically impossible to do anyway) because the meeting can simply be recorded and the software does all the work. All you need to do is press a button to record the audio of a meeting, and the Voice to CRM system will automatically enter the data in the appropriate CRM fields. No more transcribing, or filtering out data manually, or even type anything, the software does it for you.

Meeting notes have never been so accurate, and efficiently taken. Using a Voice to CRM is the best solution as it allows real-time recording for complete and accurate information, cleaning and filtering of the data gathered, as well as the automation of CRM data entry. This ensures the quality, effectiveness, and completeness of your sales meeting insights.