A few years back, I was sitting in a meeting where a debate was raging. Did it make sense to allow generic sign ups—that is, sign ups with email domains such as gmail, yahoo, or hotmail—as opposed to corporate email IDs? The sales team argued that these sign ups didn't lead to meaningful conversations and just lowered conversion rates. The marketing team countered that these leads were engaging with our web assets and restricting which ID they could use would only put them off. 

As neither side relented, we reached an impasse. This gave us time to query the database. We discovered that generic signups did have a lower revenue contribution but they also made up more than 40% of the total leads. There was a moment’s silence—no team was willing to limit TOFU leads to this extent. 

This data point effectively changed the direction of the conversation. From debating generic versus corporate domains, we turned our attention to the bigger picture: how can we use product analytics to understand the in-app behavior of different types of users and remove friction points? 

This is just one example of how data can supercharge meetings, widely considered the most necessary evil of corporate life.  Historically, the stats about meetings are sobering, wherever you look. Here’s a scathing summary from a HBR review article: We surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries: 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In the age of data, meetings can be sharper, smarter, and more purposeful than ever before. To look at how data works its magic in meetings, let’s consider the contrast first. Here are some meeting mistakes I’ve seen teams typically make. 

Going with the loudest voice: At some point or the other, we have all seen suboptimal decisions being pushed through just because they were championed by forceful or persuasive people. 

Stopping at obvious solutions: Some solutions are low-hanging and easy to arrive at but they may not be the right ones. Without the wisdom of data, we are more likely to ignore subtler causes, because of our limited capacity to look for counter-intuitive insights.

Buying into anecdotal evidence: When there’s no empirical data on the table, we naturally rely too much on anecdotal evidence or gut feel. This has its place but is not enough to make smart decisions.

Prolonged conflicts and  impasses: Opinions are a dime a dozen. In the absence of data to found decisions on, unproductive arguments flourish, leading to meetings spilling over and tempers fraying. 

The good news is, when data enters the room, it quickly becomes the most credible voice in the room, and an arbiter of disputes. 

Best practices for using data in meetings

Having data on your side doesn’t automatically make for an effective meeting. You need to present it such that it clarifies and shows a way instead of further befuddling the meeting participants. 

Before the meeting

Choose the right data

Put thought into choosing the right data sources and metrics.  For instance, if you are measuring customer satisfaction, you might utilise surveys, reviews, or feedback forms. If you want to track sales performance, you might use revenue or market share. 

Your sources need to be validated for credibility and completeness. If you walk into a meeting room with data that isn’t rock solid, not only is that particular meeting futile, but your team’s overall trust in data takes a hit. 

Share the data before the meeting

In the HBR article we quoted earlier, 71% of the managers surveyed said that their meetings were unproductive and inefficient. This is often because too many meetings are spent looking at data and PPTs.

This has an easy fix - just share your data beforehand. This way, you save meeting time and help everybody get a sharper grip on the agenda. Since your team can reflect and collect their thoughts beforehand, it reduces the cognitive demands made on them in the meeting itself, and you can all dive right into finding insights and solutioning.

During the meeting

Interpret data as a group

By encouraging your meeting participants to interpret the data collectively, you gain diverse perspectives and see into hidden corners. This exercise also promotes accountability and sharing responsibility for outcomes. 

Visualize and simplify

Numbers may not be everybody's cup of tea, so make yours easy to comprehend. Read the room, and if you have stakeholders who are not very data-savvy, make your visualization interesting with charts, dashboards, etc. 

Weave a story

Steve Jobs once said in an interview— The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. Some of you may remember the historic launch of the iPhone back in 2007, where Jobs told a story so impactful and edge-of-the-seat that he received a standing ovation. 15 years later, watching it still gives me goosebumps.

Data in itself is rather cold and dry. But weave a story around it, and your audience will sit up and listen. It will make your meeting memorable, and your insights ‘sticky’ by giving your team something to peg to. 

As you create a narrative, think through whom you are presenting to. 

For instance, senior leaders will often prefer the executive summary upfront, whereas a room full of analysts might prefer to hear the details, then the conclusion, and then the next steps. 

Use dashboards instead of time-intensive PPTs

In a traditional data-driven meeting, a lot of effort goes into gathering and prepping data for each session. Typically, accessing many different systems from CRMs to Google Analytics, juggling spreadsheets, and finally, creating a presentation deck with all the attendant bells and whistles. 

A smarter alternative: all the data resides in a shared dashboard that is accessible to relevant stakeholders throughout the work week. They can check in anytime, quickly filter for different segments, time periods, or views, and come into the meeting with a good idea of which way the wind is blowing. 

This is the sort of dashboard we are building as part of the visualization suite of DataviCloud. Our goal is that all data is accessible to business users at different levels of tech-savviness and presenters should be able to curate and visualize data in just a few minutes. 

After the meeting

Reinforce the key messages

If your subject matter is complex, your audience may not be able to process it all at one go, even if they’d had prior access to your meeting material. At such times, you may struggle to forge consensus in just one meeting. Knowing this beforehand will help you plan your agenda better. Reinforce your key messages over multiple touch points and follow-throughs starting with a simple “Insights + Action items from this meeting” email.

Use meeting analytics for continuous improvement

Have you ever considered using meeting analytics to improve your future meetings? This means tracking various data points of each meeting such as attendance, engagement, etc. Here are some ideas I think are worth exploring.

• If your meeting is online, engage participants through activities such as polls, open-ended and multiple choice questions, reactions, etc. to see how they are reacting to your content.
• Compare the Q&A between different meetings, especially on related topics, and see if common themes come up. This will give you a sense of employee sentiment.
• Ask for anonymous feedback after key meetings to see what your quieter, more passive participants think.

While using data to drive your meetings is important, even indispensable, it comes with certain concerns. If your organization doesn’t have a modern data stack, your data is probably very siloed. Imagine different stakeholders walking into a meeting, all brandishing data that doesn’t sync with each other. This happens all too often, and doesn’t really inspire confidence in the power of data. It’s something a lot of young, fast-growing businesses struggle with and a key reason why we are building DataviCloud. Join our waitlist if you’re curious about how we can help.

Have you come across interesting interventions to make meetings more effective? We’d love to know.