How Do You Build a Customer Meeting Agenda?

It doesn’t matter the types of meetings: product demos, team meetings, discovery calls, or follow–ups. Having an agenda sets the tone for efficient face-to-face conversations. When you take your time to create an agenda, it’s not just easier to get to the core of the conversation, but you also avoid gray areas that offer little to no value. Therefore, a meeting agenda serves as a means of getting crystal clear on what to cover in a meeting and puts you in the driving seat when up against customers.
Over the years, we’ve tested a series of meeting templates; while some have flopped and had to be discarded, others have brought us immense results in building trust and outlining talking points for every form of conversation. When incorporated into your sales process, these templates will create a better customer experience for you and your team members.
But first, let’s go over why you need to create a sales meeting agenda in the first place.

Why should you have a meeting agenda?

Because selling has gone virtual, salespeople can go straight to a meeting without preparation. “We will figure it out in the meeting,” they usually say. Follow this approach, and you will have a chaotic meeting that feels like a waste of time.
For instance, at SalesDeck it takes just 10 minutes to create an agenda, but this little act that seems meaningless to most sales teams helps us buy back wasted hours.
An agenda helps our Sales Reps decide how long they will stay in the meeting: When the meeting starts and ends, what questions to ask, whom to have in the meeting, and the outcome to expect. This creates organized conversations that rarely go off track, and as a result, we always have productive meetings.

Since you’ve understood the importance of having a meeting agenda, we’re happy to reveal the elements that make up a productive one, let’s walk you through it.

Building an Agenda Template

Be Clear on Meeting Objectives

The meeting’s objectives depend on the type of customer meeting. For example, with a discovery call, the goal is often to identify the prospect’s pain point and challenge. For such calls, we try to find out what our prospects already know and their position in the buyer’s journey. This determines the type of questions we will ask in the meeting.

As we’ve found out, discovery calls are often the most difficult type of customer success meetings since most salespeople try to sell right away rather than offering value upfront. That value, as Bill McCormick described in the Ep.4 of the Virtual Selling Podcast, is as simple as “talking to our clients and our prospects to find out what they’re struggling with and the areas that they need help in”. It’s easy to build trust this way”

What’s the job to be done?

Our sales team at SalesDeck holds conversations about the future in high regard, and we often pop the question up in customer meetings. Adding this item to our agenda allows us to gain insights into product expectations, the result imagined, and how to tailor our service around making their future expectation a possibility.

Identify Supporting Documents

Customers often come to meetings with a blank slate; they have zero ideas about how the meeting will go – what will be discussed and how long it will last. We often tackle this by sending the clients a brief few days before the meeting. This way, they come prepared – know the story to tell, questions to ask, answers to give, and insights on challenges.

Whenever we do this, we discover that the customer meetings transition into a conversation rather than a one-way presentation where only the salesperson is talking. This way, we also improve customer experience and avoid the popular Death by PowerPoint scenarios.

Meeting Duration

It’s important to demonstrate to the prospect that you value their time. It would be best to allocate time slots to each item on your agenda. Typically, your introduction shouldn’t go beyond 10 minutes, assuming included is the backstory of your product, while you can allocate 20 minutes to a product demo depending on the feature your product has.

Meeting Attendees

Before hopping into the meeting room, ensure that the decision makers will be in attendance and reschedule if they won’t beWith preparation spot on, here’s a customer meeting agenda template we created on Google doc for you to download and customize. To use it, make a copy to your drive, and you can edit it as you like.

Bonus Point: Improve Customer Meeting Agenda with Feedback from SalesDeck

Now that you have a template for your customer meeting, we would love to encourage you to strive for improvement by analyzing the result of each meeting and seeking feedback from team members on areas that need adjustment.

Sometimes, a new item we never thought of springs up in the meeting, and it’s only natural that we fit it into the next meeting agenda to create valid talking points. We do this after every meeting, and that’s why we’ve found a rhythm and process that always brings us results.

Fortunately, with SalesDeck, you can analyze the outcome of every customer conversation to improve the next ones. If you would love to see how SalesDeck helps you transform sales conversations, you can book a demo or sign up for the early adopter program.