How to hold effective meetings with Business Analyze

As a Business Analyze customer, data is readily available at your fingertips. Data helps you answer questions, gain insight and make better decisions.

Best of all you don’t have to use time gathering data for weekly meetings. Data is continuously updated and ready-to-use on dashboards.

But don’t keep data to yourself!

Share data directly from dashboards with meeting participants. Using data to support discussions is a good way to build trust and credibility. Data is power!

If people have different opinions,  it’s easier to build agreement with fact-based information than subjective opinions.

Meetings become more effective because you avoid pointless discussions and focus on what really matters.

It’s well worth investing a few minutes to organize dashboards to be meeting-ready.

These 4 tips will help you lead successful data-driven meetings.

Set up dashboards to match agenda

Before the meeting, check that dashboards are set up to support your agenda. Then check filters to ensure your audience sees the correct level of data – and can’t see any information that is sensitive.

It should be easy to switch between levels of data for different types of meetings.

E.g. Sales Directors with access to all data can switch between views for:

• CEO/Management team (all data)
• Department/team (by departments)
• Partner/sales channel meetings (by partner)
• Individual /one-to-one meetings (personal level)

Communicate Clear KPIs

Gather your most important  key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics on one dashboard. This helps focus people’s attention on what you want to acheive during the meeting.

Every participants has the same starting point for discussion.

You should have one or two overarching performance indicators (KPIs).  Too many will be overwhelming.

Each KPI should be clear and self-explanatory. This includes each element of the data visualisation. If people are struggling to understand what is shown on the dashboard, they won’t be listening to each other.

As you review KPIS, keep the conversation positive and ask questions such as:

• Why is the status the way it is?
• What has helped or held you back?
• What things could be better?

Your data may hold the answers to these questions.

If your KPI is ‘Growth in Sales Revenues’, for example, but you see the pipeline doesn’t have enough opportunities (pipeline refill report), you can discuss ways to fill it up.

See example of KPIs and metrics

Follow-up with actions

Once you have reviewed data and agreed next steps, follow up each meeting with activity dashboards. Activity dashboards keep everyone focused on key activities between meetings.

Let’s say you agree with your team on a new cross-selling opportunity. Your first goal is to book meetings within the next 6 weeks with all ‘A’ Customers that have purchased Product X.

You create a new dashboard with the report ‘A- Target Meetings’ and the responsible seller. Because your team shares this dashboard, everyone knows who to target and who is responsible.

As meetings are booked, dashboards are updated.

At your next meeting, you discuss what is going well and what isn’t. Some people have probably put a lot of effort into booking meetings already. Their contribution is important and should be recognized.

That’s the next step.

Recognize achievements

Every meeting should highlight some positive developments. Sharing successes builds team bonds.

You recognize acheivements on dashboards or leaderboards.

Continuing on the example above, you may add to the ‘A Customer Meeting’ dashboard a report of ‘New Meetings Booked This Week’.

Every new booking is a new ‘win’. Everyone pulls together to acheive goals.

If you are offering an incentive for good performance, add a picture of the reward or incentive to the dashboard.

For more meeting tips, contact Ann, our Head of Customer Success at ann@businessanalyze.com