The Definitive Guide to Meeting Minutes

People want better meeting minutes!
New users end up at LessMeeting from a variety of sources looking to solve a range of problems.  The two most common topics that bring the majority of traffic to our website are:  

1. Preparing agendas before the meeting
2. Writing minutes during the meeting

Sometimes we take for granted that these aren’t easy to do well.  Heck, this is large reason why we created the Meeting Template Generator.  Sure anyone can create a set of “minutes,” but there’s still a lot that separates the good from the bad.

So today’s post is a quick refresher on how to write great meeting minutes, even (gasp!) without a tool like LessMeeting.  In the future we'll revisit how to prepare great agendas.

Let’s focus on three key factors: Format, Note Types, and Collaboration.


Format
What good are meeting minutes if no one can read them?  This may seem like a ‘fluff’ item but is one of the things that will really make your minutes stand out.  People will see your notes and take notice! 

• Find a template & standardize it across your teams.  You do this for a number of documents already and minutes should be one of them.
• Sections to include: Date & Time, Location, Attendees & Roles, Agenda, Notes, Actions, Parking Lot
• Don’t write novels.  Use bullets to capture key ideas & details.  This lets you spend the meeting participating instead of furiously writing notes.
• Bonus points – Use sub-bullets to give the notes a hierarchy that makes them more readable
• Clearly call out important items.
• Mark actions with an "@" followed by the owner & date due
• Bold or highlight decisions

Note Types
There are only 3 types of notes you need to take to keep your minutes simple but also useful.

1. Key Points - These are the regular notes you'll take. I say "key” points to highlight the fact that you shouldn't write every word down. Capture the main idea and then rejoin the discussion.
2. Decisions - These are important!  Highlight them so they’re easy to find.
3. Action Items (@) - Capture all todos including the task, the owner, who the todo is owed to, and the due date.

Collaboration 

One of my pet peeves is when I notice half the room taking notes in a meeting, but no one sharing their notes afterward.  While I’m happy that people are taking notes in the first place (baby steps!), great notes come out of collaboration.  Use the wisdom of the crowd!

• While pencil & pen is always a great tool, take advantage of collaboration software to simultaneously take notes with other attendees (think Google Docs style).
• Shameless plug: LessMeeting makes this incredibly easy!
• Designate someone to combine everyone’s notes into a single doc.
• Send out meeting minutes to all attendees (even those who did NOT attend!) immediately after the meeting. 

Summary

So to recap, since this is a refresher after all:

1. Create a standardized & readable template
2. Take the right kind of notes: key points, decisions, and action items
3. Take minutes as a team

How do you take your minutes?  Leave your tips & tricks in the comments.  When you're done, register for a free LessMeeting trial to help you take great meeting minutes.

Ending Meetings Early: Maybe Not Always A Good Thing

This week I met with my project team to try to diffuse an important issue. I scheduled a 30 minute meeting with the following agenda:

Well, a few minutes in one of my colleagues asked, "Why don't we just do this...", an option that was not even thought of originally, but one that ultimately made the most sense.

The 30 minute meeting quickly ended in 12 minutes as we all agreed on the proposed solution. After the meeting ended someone said to me, "we should get a really good Meeting Quality Score for this meeting because we ended so early." When I replied that it’s a good thing we didn't ended the meeting 2 minutes earlier or we would have gotten NEGATIVE points for ending too early, I was confronted with an interesting question: Why would ending a meeting 20+ minutes early be a bad thing?

We think that there are two main reasons why ending meetings much earlier than scheduled is a bad thing:

1. When you schedule a 40 minute meeting for 60 minutes, people tend to take up the full 60 minutes when all they needed was 40. It is human nature to think "we have plenty of time left in this meeting, so let's talk about something else that isn't even on the agenda." And who said that meetings have to be 30, or 60 minutes long? What's wrong with a 25 minute meeting?
2. If you are consistently scheduling meetings longer than they need to be, then you are preventing your attendees from being able to accurately schedule the rest of their day. They may have been able to schedule something else in that time frame had you scheduled your meeting correctly.

The idea behind the Meeting Quality Score (MQS) is to drive people to have better and more effective meetings, which is the goal of LessMeeting. If the MQS can identify areas of improvement, such as doing a better job scheduling meetings, then it's helping LessMeeting achieve that goal.

While ending one meeting much earlier than it was scheduled for isn't a bad thing (in fact I think it's a good thing), mis-scheduling meetings consistently is a cause for concern.

What do you think about our meeting quality scoring? Do you think it's a bad meeting practice if you are ending meetings much earlier than scheduled? We'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments section.

Lessons Learned For Startup User Signups

Startup Sales 101 - Conversions

For any web service based startup, sales are driven by 2 key factors:

1. People visiting your site - You’ve got to get people to your site. Whether it's viral campaigns, one-on-one sales, online ads, or traditional marketing, people need to see your product or service. For online advertising this is typically the 'Click Through Rate'.
2. People signing up for your service - Once people take a look at your site, you need to make a compelling case for them to sign up. This is your 'Conversion Ratio'.

While there’s always room to improve the number of eyes reaching your pages (e.g. throw more money into advertising), you should be most interested in improving your conversion ratio.

Lessons Learned – “Why isn’t everyone signing up?”

In addition to the new features we rolled out recently (more here), we invested a considerable amount of time into updating our pricing and signup model. The LessMeeting homepage, features, registration, and pricing pages all got makeovers. Why? Simple – we needed to make the decision to try LessMeeting simpler.

Using tools like Google analytics we analyzed why people were coming to the site but not signing up. (Of course they could simply be disinterested in the product, but our research has told us that typically isn’t the problem.) The 2 culprits we discovered were:

1. Features and benefits need to be very clear – We overwhelmed users with too much information. We had to make key benefits as clear as possible so visitors could understand why this tool would help them.
2. The signup process & pricing model must be dead simple – We had too many pricing tiers and our trial/freemium model was too complex.

The new Features page

The Make-Over

We learned that customers were getting too confused about our pricing & registration and as a result, bailing on us before even giving LessMeeting a try. In retrospect I don’t blame them…and I’m especially impressed by those who made it through! So let’s look at a few mistakes that we made and how we approached a new solution.

Mistake #1 – A Complex Freemium Model

The Intent – Meetings are a team activity and we wanted to encourage teams to try LessMeeting together. In our initial freemium model, the first 3 customers at a company (defined by email address domain) could sign up for free and any additional users from that domain would have to pay for an account.

What really happened – Too complex! How do you define a “company”? What if all 3 licenses have been taken up but there is someone else at the company who really wants to try your product? What if the 3 licenses are taken up by a team in a completely different area of the company than someone new who wants to try the product? These questions go on…and get worse.

How we’re making it better – Don’t over-think your freemium model. Remember, the point is to get people using your product in a manner that makes them want to pay for more advanced features. Your freemium approach shouldn’t deter new users from signing up.

We have changed our approach so signing up is free. Always. For everyone. No credit card required. Try LessMeeting for free for 30 days and if you like it after that, then it’s a simple $12 flat fee per user per month.

Summary – Freemiums should be simple. Their goal is to get your product in as many hands as possible; anything else and you're overdoing it.

Mistake #2 – Too Many Pricing Tiers

The Intent – We originally had three pricing/feature tiers. We thought this would allow us to uniquely cater to power users, casual users, small companies, big companies, team leads, and team members alike.

What really happened – Our customers didn’t need tiers. Every one of our paying customers had signed up for the same middle tier. We got a lot of questions regarding the features related to the different tiers (e.g. “can I pay for the teams pages, but just for 5 of our users?”). In general, we found that having more pricing/feature tiers was just confusing to our users and added barriers to the buying decision.

How we’re making it better – Tiers makes sense for a lot of startups. But not us. If you're a startup (or any software company) consider if your customers really need the additional pricing levels. We ended up trying to build useless features just to justify different tiers that no one even used. Now we've changed to a single tier with a simple $12 flat fee per month.

Summary – If your customers don’t understand your pricing model, don’t try to explain it to them. Change your pricing model.

Mistake #3 - Overzealous Signup Process

The Intent – We wanted to give you all the information we could about LessMeeting so that there was no possible way you wouldn’t want to sign up.

What really happened – No one read the text filled feature pages. Users got lost getting from the homepage to the registration page. There was no call to action. In the end, users didn’t sign up as often as we thought they would.

How we’re making it better – It’s critical that you streamline your signup process. It's no different than the “shopping cart” process online retailers use. Identify what your target “funnel” is and build your registration process around it, including a clear call to action at each step.

For LessMeeting, we want you to: 1) Start on the homepage, 2) View a much improved features page, 3) View our simplified pricing model, 4) Register and signup, and 5) Start using LessMeeting. Users need to be able to complete this in just a couple minutes too, as that’s likely all you’ll have their attention for.

Summary – Make signup as fast as possible.

Mistake #4 – Complex Incentives

The Intent – We want to encourage customers to buy by providing discounts.

What really happened – Only the squeakiest wheel was heard. All of our customers deserved to know about the discount options but only those that asked about them found out. While we didn’t intentionally hide our discounts, we didn’t do the best job of announcing them either.

How we’re making it better – Advertise your discounts. Sign up for a group of licenses (starting at just 10 users!) and get a discount. Or, pay yearly instead of monthly and get a discount. Discounts should be your friend. We want to give these discounts to every single one of our customers. First, it helps our cash flow (Startup Finance 101) and builds momentum via a larger user base. More importantly, it makes your customers happy.

Summary – Reward your customers for buying behaviors that help out your company too.

Guess the Theme? (hint: it's a simple answer)

Notice a theme? It’s nothing new, but we needed to be reminded of it so decided it's worth passing on – Keep It Simple. Having a great product or service is only half the battle for startups…you need to get people to actually sign up for your product. In summary:

1. Avoid complex freemium models
2. Reduce the complexity of your pricing
3. Reduce the number of actions required to signup
4. Reward your customers for the right things
5. Above all make you product easy to understand

Simplifying Things: Tutorial and Moving Notes (Release 2.3)

"Can you give us a tutorial?" 
"I'm having trouble moving notes around?"
 
Once again you asked and we listened.  LessMeeting updates keep coming - here are two new features that we're excited to have rolled out over the holiday weekend.

New Tutorial

Feel like you’re not utilizing LessMeeting to its full potential but don’t have time to read the manual?  The new tutorial walks you through the best features of the meeting page, including:

• Tips about creating notes
•  Shortcuts for assigning action items 
• How to close out a meeting

New users will automatically see the tutorial after they sign up. Existing users can access the tutorial by clicking the Help link at the top and then clicking the “Take Tutorial” button.

Want to learn the keyboard shortcut to add an action item?

Easier Drag/Drop

We have been looking for ways to make it easier to move notes and think we’ve found the solution. Now when you drag a note two buttons will appear: “Move Before” and “As Sub-Note”.  

Drag the note and drop it on one of those buttons to complete the move with greater precision.

Keep the suggestions coming, we love to hear from you. Email your ideas to Staff@LessMeeting.com or Tweet us @LessMeeting.