Issue 6 - 4 Types Of Sales Meetings You Probably Hate

You've heard it before. Prospects hate having their time wasted. But what about the sellers who also dread joining the meeting?

Last year, Aldric Chen wrote a Medium article that sums up a lot of seller discourse across the industry with 4 Types of Sales Meetings I Genuinely Hate & Will Find All Ways to Escape.

The article garnered some kudos, as many sellers on Reddit and LinkedIn share a similar sentiment. It may be a hot take, but sellers dislike wasting time on meetings just as much as prospects. But what do these bad meetings look like? And how can you prevent them?

Chen had a few ways of describing the types of meetings sellers hate. Here are the three that resonate most widely across the industry.

The pre-prospecting meeting

Chen describes the folks who are too far at the top of the funnel and come to you inbound. They want to know the basics of the product, they might not even have a pain for you to solve yet, and they just want to be shown who you are instead of taking a quick look through your website.

The meeting with the chatty executives

These are the executives with a lot on their plates, who like to talk non-stop and take the conversation on a tangent. Chen says these types are difficult to get to commit to an agenda, and even more difficult to get them to stick to it.

"I used to believe that clients speaking freely in my presence showed sales potential. It might lead to a deal. Wrong.

• A conversation going nowhere gets us nowhere.
• The sales effort going nowhere brings us nowhere."

The meeting to derail the deal

These are, according to Chen, the "let's take a step back" prospects. After months of working on the deal, and reaching the final moments before close, a certain stakeholder on the buying committee might get cold feet and encourage the team to "reevaluate their needs". The reasons vary from redlining to budget reviews, but it's all equally frustrating.

None of these meeting types are unfamiliar to you. But what can you do to ensure the don't repeat themselves?

Meet, Meeting Brief

Pod builds tooling with sellers in mind, and we understand exactly why some meetings suck. We've built a feature to help sellers ensure every meeting is productive and successful. Here's how:

1.) Attendee highlights: Meeting Brief will help you automatically highlight when a key stakeholder is attending the call, if an attendee has a downward trending sentiment about the deal, and if a key contact is missing.

2.) Agenda setting: To better prepare you, Pod will also recommend 5-10 key topics to cover on your call. It does so by analyzing key topics from the previous call, any pending questions from the previous call, topics left uncovered from your sales framework, and recent email exchanges.

3.) Send a prep email: Prior to the call, Meeting Brief will also draft a unique email for the stakeholders attending the call. It uses your email exchanges and notes from the previous call to get everyone up to speed and ready to have a productive call.

For the complete rundown, check out our guide here.

Quit dreading your calls, and start enjoying connecting with your prospects again.

Bite-sized stories

Links of the week:

• The Top Books To Master Selling
  
  
• Zoom Pivots to an AI Company
  
  
• Revenue Leaders Uncovered with Oliver Paull

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