1. Interviews

Interviews

Regardless of whether you're a full-time recruiter or a hiring manager in a corporate HR department, one of your jobs is to scout for talent. After you successfully go through multiple resumes and shortlist the best candidates, interviews offer the critical opportunity to meet with these potential hires face to face before making your final placements.

Interviews help you to understand your candidates better and critically analyze who will match the requirements for the role. Your discernment about the candidate and their skills during the interview plays a crucial factor towards the growth of an organization. If you're staffing for multiple clients, this means that your brand reputation is on the line with every interview you schedule. For internal HR teams, a smooth interview process plays directly into new hire retention and engagement.

Candidates understanding the culture of the organization they're joining is also important during the interview. Not only does this give them a better idea of what strengths they can bring to the work environment, but it gives you insight into whether a candidate will be a good match.

Tips for running an amazing interview:

  • Represent your organization and its values accurately to retain top candidates
  • Maintain professionalism, but also be approachable—especially if you're doing video interviews
  • Explain the interview process fully so candidates know what to expect
  • Give positive and constructive feedback toward the end to boost engagement

All that said, successful interviews are about more than just the questions and conversation. Scheduling interviews can be a time sink for both you and your candidates, and if managed poorly, it can also create a bad first impression with your top matches. Scheduling software like Zoho Bookings allows your candidates to book their interviews from your available time slots directly and even participate in one-way or live video interviews through integrations.

2. Sales meetings

Sales meetings

In business, selling is crucial. It helps your organization to survive and drive revenue. To stay ahead of your competitors, it's essential to refine your sales strategies internally and confidently execute them with target audience. Meeting with your sales team, leads, and users can be an effective way to close communication gaps and improve customer satisfaction.

1. Internal sales meetings

An internal sales meeting allows you to analyze sales performance, inform sales teams about product updates, discuss challenges that your sales team is facing, and find solutions that work. Ideally, the agenda of a meeting like this is to motivate your sales team and give them any information they need to sell more effectively. The time your sales team spends in a meeting is time they are not meeting with prospects, so communicating simple updates via email is essential to avoid killing sales time.

Tips for conducting a great internal sales meeting:

  • Analyze competitors and come up with insights
  • Analyze internal sales metrics and pipeline quality
  • Notify the team of any new product features or updates
  • Discuss any challenges the sales teams face while meeting with customers
  • Recognize the team for their conversions in the past week or month
  • Discuss big picture goals and come up with new milestones to reach before the next meeting

2. Customer sales meetings

Only 13% of customers believe a sales person can understand their needs. Your sales team is the bridge that brings your customers onboard despite the continuous flow of competition. The discovery call, sales pitch, demo, follow-up, and onboarding meetings that your sales reps have with customers need to be executed flawlessly.

Whether you run a B2B or B2C business, the goal for these meetings should be to educate leads, understand their needs, clarify their questions, and convert qualified prospects into repeat customers for your organization.

Tips for conducting a great customer sales meeting:

  • Strive to understand the prospect's pain points
  • Understand the customers' business and values
  • Let them know how your product can help with their obstacles
  • Provide them with clear solutions when they have questions
  • Let the conversation be two-way
  • Ensure they understand your product or service well during the demo
  • Give them clear action steps at the end of the meeting and follow-up promptly

If you're communicating with your customers through back-and-forth emails and endless phone calls to agree upon a time to meet, you're wasting valuable time that can be spent preparing an awesome sales pitch. Having an online appointment scheduling software like Zoho Bookings will allow your customers to request appointments themselves. Not only does this increase customer satisfaction, but it gives you time to focus on selling.

Related read: We've listed the 10 best meeting schedulers that will help you to streamline your meetings.

3. Customer services meetings

Customer services meetings

If you run a service-based business, meeting with your customers is inevitable. Unlike other meeting types we discuss in this article, services directly generate revenue for those offering them. Instead of being just one part of a long cycle of interaction, this meeting is the product, and you have to impress a customer in a comparatively short amount of time.

For these meetings, learn as much as you can about your target audience. Listen to their pain points, provide a clear plan to solve them in the allotted timeframe, and then execute well. This applies to any service-based product, whether offered virtually through a custom website, or in person at a brick-and-mortar shop.

Tips for conducting exceptional service meetings:

  • Simplify appointment scheduling with online software
  • Honor customer appointments and send confirmation emails
  • Focus on building a good relationship in order to increase the chances of repeat business
  • Gather feedback from your customers and work with them to provide a more satisfying experience

While online scheduling software can help simplify all the meeting types, it is especially vital for service meetings. When customers are right on the edge of making a purchase, you don't want to make it difficult for them to convert. With Zoho Bookings, you can list your available services and time slots, and customers can easily register for the one of their choice. Collect payments, send automated confirmations, and remind customers about their upcoming appointments right from a single app.

4. Consultations

Consultations

For any consultant to demonstrate their expertise with their customers, whether that's businesses or individuals, they have to meet with them quite often. This makes them similar to service meetings, but each interaction is just one part of the product. For example, consultants may offer expert guidance, prepare a business or action plan, provide constructive feedback, or solve issues directly—but this will happen in a matter of days, weeks, or even months rather than hours.

This means that your time (and your customers' time!) is on the line more than ever. Each meeting must build on the previous one, maintaining productivity and momentum so customers don't feel as though their time is being wasted.

Tips for maintaining an ongoing consultation relationship:

  • Treat every customer and their requirements as unique and deserving of your full effort
  • Learn the day-to-day working process of the client
  • Offer relevant solutions or guidance that help them meet their needs
  • Create milestones and formulate a step-by-step plan with the customer
  • Be prepared for customers to disagree with you and have alternative plans ready
  • Offer added value through education alongside your problem-solving

Scheduling plays a huge role in how smooth your client's experience will be. If they are having to hunt you down via email or phone call to schedule each additional meeting, then they will be more likely to move on to one of your competitors. Zoho Bookings not only helps you schedule multiple meetings ahead of time, but you can also meet with customers virtually through Zoho Meeting or Zoom. Consult with your customers without worrying about double-bookings or no-shows.

5. Webinars

Webinars

Webinars are usually online meetings with multiple people. You can reach out to your employees or your customers through a webinar for different purposes, such as educating, training, launching a product, weekly/monthly company meetings, or updates. Like other meetings, the product you're selling here is the information you provide, but the goal is to build a stronger organizational community with employees, customers, and prospects alike.

Tips for conducting engaging webinars:

  • Practice in advance with all the tech and media you'll be using on the day of the webinar
  • Focus on delivering quality content in an easy-to-digest way
  • Use appropriate visuals to keep the audience engaged
  • Make connections that target the audience's pain points directly
  • Demonstrate new product or service features to excite customers and convert more leads
  • Engage with your audience by asking questions or running a poll

Webinars are already hosted digitally, so an online scheduling platform is a no-brainer. Many platforms will also integrate with your webinar hosting solution, like Zoho Meeting, Zoho ShowTime, or Zoom Meeting.

6. Project meetings

Project meetings

Projects often require internal meetings that start right from the inception of a project and continue until its successful completion. These meetings are more or less like a compass that helps your project progress in the right direction. During them, your teams, customers, and board members will meet under different circumstances to discuss important aspects of the project and make any necessary decisions required to finish the project successfully.

When run efficiently, project meetings:

  • Increase team collaboration and productivity
  • Build responsibility and accountability among your workforce
  • Keep everyone working toward a common goal
  • Encourage healthy dialogue for generating new ideas or solutions
  • Create a culture of continuous feedback and improvement
  • Improve relationships with external stakeholders

Project meetings follow the stages of the project itself:

  • 1. Direction: The phase where a new business project enters your workspace. You give your team a new vision, and it's necessary to create action steps to progress towards that vision. Meeting focuses could be idea generation, planning, or team building.
  • 2. Navigation: After laying out the project plan and working on it, the navigation phase is when you regroup to analyze the performance of the teams and the project overall. It helps to keep track of the journey and make any necessary changes to align back to the goal. Meetings during this phase tend to focus on team dynamics, progress checking, and added innovation.
  • 3. Progression: The progression phase occurs when the project has evolved and is nearing its goal. It's a crucial part of the project's success, and your efforts, feedback, and decisions in this phase will determine the efficacy of the project. Key meeting topics include problem-solving, decision-making, and feedback.

Here's some food for thought: almost any meeting can be considered a project meeting. For example, interviews can be a part of hiring projects, and consultations can be classified as a small part of sales meetings.

This opens up another set of meetings types that are closely correlated with project meetings. While the meetings mentioned below are internal in nature, they can also be a part of the other external meeting types we've seen so far.

7. Status update meeting

Status update meeting

Status update meetings allow team members to catch up and discuss project status, related challenges, and goals for the week or the month ahead. The meeting interval can vary depending on the project and team needs. This meeting type helps keep the momentum going, and it primarily focuses on maintaining project direction, resolving challenges, and revising the action plan.

Tips for conducting status update meetings:

  • Share and celebrate the milestones achieved since the last meeting
  • Discuss roadblocks and determine possible workarounds
  • Make necessary changes to the work plan to reach the goal efficiently
  • Encourage every team member to share feedback
  • Motivate teams to keep up the phenomenal work

8. Decision-making meeting

Decision-making meeting

It's essential to keep all necessary parties in the loop while making important decisions within an organization. Whether you're hiring, plotting a new course of action, or even determining contingency plans, a decision-making meeting should focus on discussing what's at stake, coming to a unified agreement, and finishing the session with a blueprint for future action.

Tips for conducting an effective decision-making meeting:

  • Present the situation that needs attention
  • Ensure all data regarding the situation is brought to the table
  • Identify risks and look into all possibilities
  • Encourage all team members to share their perspectives before concluding
  • Ensure the decision aligns with the organization's goal

9. Problem-solving meeting

Problem-solving meeting

Simply put, these types of meetings allow teams to evaluate challenges and find solutions. It's common for organizations to develop issues that need immediate attention, and teams can use problem-solving meetings to address these concerns. While it may seem easier for individual team members to find short-term fixes on their own, the chances of problems recurring at a later stage are often higher. Instead, it's best for teams to collaborate in discovering the optimal solution.

To conduct good problem-solving meetings:

  • Discuss and analyze the problem in depth
  • Come up with an alternative course of action or a possible fix
  • Carefully evaluate the chosen solution before enforcing it
  • Formulate a contingency plan

10. Team-building meeting

Team-building meeting

Team-building meetings are key to solidifying connections and improving collaboration. It's best to engage team members with fun activities that focus on developing clear communication and breaking down barriers. This leads to a stronger work culture and increased motivation among employees.

Benefits of a good team-building meeting:

  • Boosts employee motivation and confidence
  • Strengthens the relationships among team members
  • Improves company culture and team performance
  • Enhances communication and trust
  • Cultivates creativity and innovative thinking
  • Aligns team interest toward a common goal

11. Innovation meeting

Innovation meeting

During innovation meetings, team members can brainstorm and build upon shared ideas to bring a fresh approach to their workflow. When businesses take steps to promote new ideas, they're able to break from the monotony and expand their horizons. The goal of this meeting type is to uncover insights and develop new strategies for your business.

Tips for conducting a successful innovation meeting:

  • Create an environment that allows every member to share ideas freely
  • Consider customer perspective, as your ideas will eventually impact how they experience your service.

The meeting matrix

The following matrix provides a visual representation of the 11 common meeting types, as well as how they interconnect. Click around the matrix to map the external meetings (horizontal) that warrant internal meetings (vertical).

  • Meeting types Interviews Sales meetings Customer service meetings Consultations Webinars Project meetings
  • Status update meetings            
  • Decision-making meetings            
  • Problem-solving meetings            
  • Team-building meetings            
  • Innovation meetings            

While all of these meetings can be crucial to the success of a project, bear in mind that your employees are also keeping up with other work responsibilities. It's important to make sure that meetings don't eat away more time than necessary and that all employees clearly understand when they'll be held, their purpose, and the expected duration. A dependable meeting scheduling system will allow you to list project meetings under a single URL, making it easier for your teams to book them as needed. Furthermore, an effective scheduling solution will integrate with your email and calendar systems so that everyone stays on the same page at all times.

Final thoughts

Meetings are an integral part of your business. A good meeting stokes productivity and leads your business toward successful growth. Yet every year, 24 billion hours will be wasted in pointless meetings. So the next time you get into a meeting, be sure that it ends up being meaningful and productive for your customers, employees, and your business.

Happy meeting!

With a powerful online meeting scheduler like Zoho Bookings:

  • Allow customers to book meetings with just a few clicks
  • Manage your teams and collaborate on projects easier
  • Sync meetings into your calendar for better planning
  • Eliminate double-bookings and no-shows
  • Send automatic email notifications and reminders
  • Collect payments and meet through video conference without hassle
With a powerful online meeting scheduler like Zoho Bookings
                   

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