Conversational Intelligence: What sales meetings have been missing

Meetings are undeniably crucial to the buyer experience. Whether they happen digitally or in person, meetings are the most important touchpoints sellers have with buyers. Everything else—emails, social posts, blogs, eBooks, infographics, and research reports—is about securing that all-important meeting. When meetings go well, deals close; when they don’t, deals die—or stall if you’re lucky.

But despite how critical they are to the buyer experience, meetings remain shrouded in mystery because, unless they’re recorded and shared, only those who attend them have an idea how they went. And even anecdotal accounts could be biased or skewed. Sure, recordings shed more light, but they’re not often referenced. Accessing them can be difficult, and reviewing them takes too much time. Let’s face it: after a full day of meetings, the last thing anyone wants to do is listen to another meeting they didn’t attend. Even the most in-tune sales leaders can’t scale this activity. It might be manageable if you only have a few direct reports, but not when you have a bigger team.

These roadblocks make it hard to evaluate how sellers are conducting their meetings, let alone implement best practices for improvement. And improvement is much needed because buyers generally say that sellers don’t sufficiently understand them. According to Salesforce, while 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs, only 34% of companies actually do. Furthermore, today’s buyer is more informed than ever, spending only 5% of the sales cycle with a seller right at the cusp of making a purchasing decision. So, meetings really are “make-or-break” scenarios. Add the fact that only 53% of sellers say the tech they use improves their productivity and results, and it’s safe to assume that “break” is too often the outcome.

So, given how important meetings are and how they represent a historically small window of opportunity, the question is, why aren’t sellers upping their game?

The answer is they’re not being enabled to.