Our guest blogger this week, Chris Hicken, gives us his take on how to establish guidelines for a healthy meeting culture. Enjoy!
By Chris Hicken
“Make sure you spend enough time with your customer building relationships” is some of the worst advice given to Customer Success Managers. Every interaction with a customer is precious, and the best teams use the Golden Rule that states: “You must deliver value to your customers at each touchpoint.”
CSMs are likely to copy company and department meeting standards for customer calls, which makes it critical to define a good meeting culture internally.
Here, I’ll outline a path you can take immediately to audit and shape up the meeting culture within your team. Then, I’ll share some tips on how to establish meeting guidelines that apply to your team’s internal meetings as well as your CSM’s kickoff calls, QBRs, and other customer meetings.
Pulse check: Does your team have a bad meeting culture?
To audit your team’s meeting culture, make a copy of this 5-question survey to send to the team. Then, compare their responses to this “poor, average, excellent” scorecard to understand where your meeting culture sits.
1. More than 20% of your team members’ time is spent in internal meetings. 20% of the average 5 day work week equals about 2 hours per day. No individual contributor should be spending more than 2 hours per day in internal meetings.
Take a hard look at your report’s schedules. Are there any meetings used to share information or get approval? Cut them—both can be done via email. For any meetings that remain, consider the time allotted. Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fit the designated time frame. Use that concept as a forcing function to be efficient.
2. The team consistently feels that meetings “should have been an email.” Oftentimes, we want to share context about a recent decision with our team. A meeting is scheduled as a quick and human way to get the information across. But often these meetings have no structure, most attendees aren’t fully listening, and suddenly 30 minutes have slipped by.
Think about it. If you had spent 30 minutes writing a thoughtful email, you would’ve saved your team from wasting productive time in their day. Instead, take a fine tooth comb to your reports’ schedules and cut nearly all of their internal meetings. It will save time and money.
3. Attendance is based on politics. It’s a bad sign when meeting attendance is important purely for political reasons, like to have a department presence with no goal of how that person should participate. It usually goes like this: “We should get Alison from Support to attend this meeting.” Or, “I should go to that meeting so I’m visible to Andrew.”
When attendance is political and not based on value, it’s a sign of deep-rooted issues. Fixing your meeting culture will be a step in the right direction.
4. Meetings consistently have large invite lists. Except for company or team all-hands, meetings should rarely have more than ~8 people. Any more than that and you either have too many voices or the meeting’s being used to distribute information.
Establish internal guidelines so meetings are used intentionally
Once you have a pulse on your meeting culture (and which areas were rated poorly), create an action plan to shift team behavior in the right direction. A healthy meeting culture starts by establishing guidelines. Think of this exercise as similar to setting team values or a mission statement—it should clearly articulate the behaviors you want (and don’t want) to see.
Below, I’ve outlined the meeting guidelines we use at ‘nuffsaid. Each statement is used internally—and I’ll call out that these have evolved over time as we regularly review them—but they’re also applicable externally with customers.
#1 Don’t use meetings to share information or get approval.
Internal guideline: There’s no reason to get everyone together for status updates or to share context—manage those over chat and email instead. Meetings should be used strictly to assign tasks, make decisions, remove blockers, requesting feedback, and for training or onboarding.
External application: Audit your onboarding calls, QBRs, and other standard meeting templates and assess the value delivered to customers. Note: asking tons of discovery questions is great for you, but not for the customer. Ask CSMs to record their meetings and share examples of value delivered to others on the team.
#2 Bundle all recurring meetings on the same day when possible.
Internal guideline: It’s difficult for the human brain to switch working modes quickly, especially when shifting focus from internal meetings to external meetings to proactively reviewing customer data. So try bundling internal meetings together to leave CSMs with long stretches of uninterrupted time to focus on customers.
External application: CSMs should aim to schedule similar types of customer meetings on the same day and back to back, so they have large, interrupted chunks of time dedicated to proactively seeing where they can help customers get more value out of the product.
#3 Share an agenda at least 24 hours before the meeting.
Internal guideline: Some people don’t perform as well in meetings because they don’t process information “on the spot” by talking things out. They prefer to think about a topic ahead of time, form an opinion, and then share that point of view with the group. Individuals who operate this way often have the most elegant solutions to problems, just not under pressure. It’s in your best interest to hear from all the voices on your team, not just from those who think well on their feet.
External application: Although it’s standard practice to send agendas ahead of time, it’s even more important to highlight the things customers should come prepared to discuss. After each meeting, CSMs must send action items with an owner and date and review them at the next conversation.
#4 Assign ownership for meeting culture.
Internal & external: Someone, most likely you, needs to be accountable for vetoing recurring meetings that don’t add value to the customer experience.
Build a simple process where your reports check with you before scheduling recurring meetings. You’ll find that most requests for recurring meetings are for “sharing information” like check-ins.
#5 Ask for feedback.
Internal guideline: Every quarter, ask your team to fill out the meeting culture survey to measure your progress towards a healthy meeting culture.
External application: Consider sending out a customer feedback survey about the meetings customers have with individuals on your team. How valuable is each meeting? Are they given adequate time to prepare? Is the agenda thorough?—is it followed? This will verify whether or not the customer is receiving high value meeting time.
Summary
Customers appreciate when meetings are consistently valuable—but CSMs are often trained to have regular check-ins with customers, and not trained to design thoughtful conversations and to know when to use email. Start by establishing guidelines for a healthy meeting culture within your team, reinforce that culture through training, and coach CSMs to apply the same principles externally.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a Certified CSM program which features classes including Kicking off the Relationship and Time Management for CSMs. Visit TheSuccessLeague.io for these and our other classes and business coaching offerings.
Chris Hicken - Chris Hicken is a Co-Founder and CEO of ‘nuffsaid—the Workflow Intelligence product that helps Customer Success teams focus on the right customers at the right time. Chris has 15 years of experience as a leader, investor, advisor, and board member, and was formerly the President and COO at UserTesting. He is an advocate for Customer Success leaders and was recognized as a Top 100 Customer Success Strategists in 2020.