Pre-constructing the Room: The New Science of Enterprise Meeting Prep

You.

Gerhard, thank you so much for having me back. I'm so excited to be here and the sessions and topics and speakers are amazing. Really excited to be part of it. And you know, the thing that I'm going to talk about today is pre constructing the room. You know, a lot of come, a lot of people know my company does a real sophisticated form of business development, sales development for enterprise tech companies. And the way that we do it enables us to be very embedded with their sales and marketing organizations. We have full line of sight into processes and one of the interesting things is, you know, we're able to see what is supposed to happen, what everybody thinks is happening and, and what's actually happening, which are all three different things. And because of that, a couple years ago when ChatGPT came out, we were all over that like building GPTs for clients and giving them deep meeting insights. And I've actually worked with organizational and behavioral psychologists to be able to construct insights for clients that is giving them a real edge in their meeting prep and in those early meetings because that is so critical to making a difference whether that next meeting even happens or not. You know, there's a stat that 84% of enterprise deals just basically die in the first meeting. And a lot of it is because there's this complete misalignment of expectations and what needs to be said and covered and what actually does. And so I'm going to talk about that. And the other thing is as we were building these tools for our clients and talking to people, it's really a huge space in being able to address just meeting prep. You know, a lot of the tools that we see, like a lot of the meeting assistants, for example, like GONG or course or whatever you might use. And those have a lot of capability for reflection, hindsight, get information from a previous call to apply to the next, but it doesn't really address the first calls. And also I find that with the amount of pressure, everybody's over, they're very underutilized. And what I mean by that is so when you're in a GONG meeting and you the meeting wraps up, you get a summary email to the prospects and all the tools do that. It's not just gong, but you get a summary email. And so what I see is a lot of times that just goes off, maybe a couple of edits might happen.

Or you look at the transcript or the summary of the call. And I find that a lot of these tools are pretty generous with how they're describing them. They really kind of missed the Mark on sentiment because I've seen things happen in meetings that were definitely negative and totally missed it in the summary. So there's that. And some of those things happen because of a lack of meeting prep. And so as we were building tools, it was clear to us that there's something missing in this front space. So for the last 18 months, we've been building a meeting prep environment that is going to hit. We're rolling it out next month. I'm going to give everybody a peek into it and an ability to sign up for the wait list. But also just talking about how important this is because meeting prep is, it's just such a huge factor in success of meetings and it's something that gets neglected a lot. So, you know, we've all lost deals and you know, I've lost deals because, you know, things I didn't see happening or, you know, I've, I've watched deals get lost. I mean, all of us have dealt with that. But the thing is, is there's so much information available to us now and the utilization of that information is the capabilities are really endless. So knowing what. And reflecting on. Yeah, that's happened, that's happened to me. All of us have walked into a meeting with, you know, less information than we wish we had just because of time or, you know, whatever it is. But I know there's really a way to completely avoid that now.

You know, one of, one of the things that I'm acutely aware of is the, the amount of.

Kind of the degradation of meeting quality. So it was interesting because there's this stat here of 10 years ago, 82% of buyers said that reps were unprepared. And I've, I've read that in a ton of different reports. And if there's anything in here that you want information on after, just shoot me an email. I didn't want to use up slides with like source information, but I can certainly provide all those. So here it is. Over 10 years. We've got LinkedIn and Sales Navigator and Gong and Chorus and, you know, Zoom info and ChatGPT and all these things. And the, the latest 2024, 2025 data says now it's 84% are unprepared. You know, all that tech and it made it worse. And so why did it make it worse? Some of it is, there's a lot of scattered information. So, you know, I've, I've got full line of sight into CRM environments of, you know, dozens of companies that we've worked with. And I see patterns in all of them. And I actually spoke about this at Dreamforce. You know, when, when we look in CRM instances, what I see is eras of management. So I'll see, oh, they used to do this, or at one time they were doing that, or, you know, there's, there's different tells as to how information was managed. The other thing is, you know, the companies buy all this stuff for their reps. You know, they buy all these tools and sales intel and all these things. Nobody's using them. So there's a very small amount of tools that actually are fully utilized in CRM systems. So I see that a lot. I see a lot of underutilized tools and I see information is not consolidated. So even if there was some deep intel in there, it's not easy to find. And I find that most reps aren't deep digging through. They're certainly not looking through notes of people that haven't worked there in a couple of years, or they're not looking at recordings. There's so many things that are just missed. And so. And something interesting about that. I have this conversation with somebody recently and they were saying, well, the CRM is the source of truth. I'm like, I don't think so. You know, I've seen a lot of CRMs, and I would not say the CRM is a source of truth, especially because the CRM is very limited. People are busy, they're not doing these big narrations of notes.

You know, like a very important call, somebody declines to be recorded, the whole thing's lost. So there's a lot that the CRM doesn't have over time. Like, depending on what your TAM is, you might have this set of accounts that there is some intel. It's nowhere in the CRM because that's just it. It's not a practice to do that. There's a lot of limited notes. There's, you know, it's kind of cryptic. You, you know, and then the person doesn't even work there anymore, so you don't know what it meant. So I see a lot of that. So I would not consider the CRM like the go to for information. It can be over time. But the other thing is, as you adopt AI tools, it's only as good as the data that you have. So if you're looking to implement something with your data, you've got to do a massive cleanup first. And that's. It's very manual. It's, you know, there's not really a way to get around that. So I see a lot of times with reporting, you know, people just want to run a report, like, well, let's run a report and see what's happening. It's like, you know, that that report is not actually giving you the kind of facets of what is happening. And so.

There'S a lot of blind spots and a lack of, kind of a process for getting the kind of intel that reps need to be really effective on those first meetings. So the math is simple. If you're unprepared on just 20% of meetings, so an average enterprise deal, you know, you lose up to a million dollars a year in closed business just because they went quiet. They, they made a wrong decision. You know, I've seen meetings just go dark because, you know, something was set on the call that was a lack of prep. You know, they shouldn't have said that everybody goes dark. So people are busy. So it's really hard to kind of dig out of those kind of ditches when it happens. And so you want to really avoid it at all costs.

What does unprepared look like? So I see these kind of scripts that happen, you know, so tell me about your company. And you know, being I've owned my company for, you know, over two decades, I get a ton of sales outreach. And first off, I can always tell who's, who's incentivized by meetings because they're just trying to get a meeting, which drives me crazy. And, or they'll ask really simple questions. And I love when people call and say, so what do you do exactly? And it's like, would you not have a browser? Like, why would you not look that up first before you call me? And you know, whether you're, you're talking to me or you're talking to someone at, you know, a billion dollar a year company, you don't want to ask questions that are things in the public domain that you could find in like, you know, a minute. The other thing, well, if you could wave a magic wand, right? So I hate that question so much because it's tried, it's old, but also they don't know, like a lot of prospects don't know what they, what they want. So it's really up to you to guide them to what they want. And when you have the right intel, you can ask the right question questions because you kind of understand what their pain is. You know, another thing, like sometimes people might fill out a form. So what made you reach out? You know, you can, you can find things that are going on in that company that would have made them reach out. So, you know that that's the thing you want to know so that you're offering information and your credibility goes way up when you're asking the right things. You know, I just had, you know, we have a new client and I had ran our report on their company and, you know, I learned so much about them. And it was really funny because it actually was spot on with what they're dealing with. And just the fact that I knew that ahead of time just made such a huge difference and what an awesome call it was. So it wasn't a call to learning what they do. It was a call where we were participating in what their problem was. And so that's really where we want to be in those first calls. And, you know, over the last decade, there's been tons and tons of research. Like, prospects want to, you know, kind of manage their own interaction with a company. They don't want to talk to a rep until way later. They do their own digital research they did, you know, so they're avoiding reps and until a later stage. So. And we all know that. But when they do engage with you, you gotta make sure that you're adding a lot of value so that when you are talking to them, it was a really good move to have this discussion. And then they're eager to engage with you. So meeting prep makes that kind of difference rather than them repeating stuff that you could do a search. You know, the other thing is when you're asking stuff like this, like, a lot of intro calls are 30 minutes. So, you know, you're spending 15 minutes presenting something, or maybe a deck was thrown together, you know, with information that is basically you telling them about their company. Like, well, we know you do this and we know you do that. And it's like, yeah, we know too, right? So you want to be able to say, so we think that things like this are happening. Is that true? And, wow, it just makes such a huge difference.

So here's the kind of signals that the top reps know. So, and it's interesting because when I, when I see people doing this kind of prep, what a huge difference. You know, one of our, one of our users on our platform now, they had somebody, they actually hired somebody to do this level of research, and it was taking them hours just to prep for, for one meeting. But that information is what really makes a difference so that you keep having calls. It's a very competitive space. If you work in a really competitive space, you gotta make sure that you're really bringing something to the table up front that makes them want to talk to you again. So like trigger events, timing trigger events. Like, you know, maybe they're dealing with, maybe they just went through a rift, maybe they're in some deluge of litigation. You know, things that are really have a bearing on how they're going to think about this real org chart and personalities. So what do you know about the person? I'm really, I've always been very focused on really understanding how people think and really capturing that kind of information. And you know, I've been working in, in B2B tech and B2B sales for many years and I've got a pretty big data set to work with. Everybody doesn't necessarily have that either. So while they've got a lot of insight and depth into their space, you know, being able to understand even more about, okay, they were here at this company for this amount of time. And that tells me this and the fact that they wrote it out through these types of changes that went on in this company tells me that they've got a lot of resilience, the fact that they're working with this person. So maybe you're going into a meeting and you're, you know, maybe you've got like four or five people in that meeting and everybody's different. Like you've got sourcing, you've got supply chain, you've got it. There's different people in there. You want to understand, you know, how this is all interacting. Like what, how your solution is addressing all of these and how they're, they're, their opinion of it. You know, where, how is that weighted across this based on what you're doing. So you can get a pretty good high level from that. You know, the political map, hidden drivers, financial pain, growth signals, all of those things are huge. And when you know that and you know how to interpret it. So that's the second part is how do you interpret the data that you find? Now that's a big deal. So, okay, what we did, and I'm so excited to show this, is we built an enterprise platform for meeting prep that gives you information that is so rich that you can walk into a meeting and know exactly what to do. And you understand so much about the people. You've got an AI coach, you've got real time. There's so many real time access to guidance on it. There's so many things that.

You can consolidate on your meeting prep so you don't have to toggle through you know, oh, LinkedIn. Is there anything here on LinkedIn? Oh, here's a news. Oh, here's a Google alert. You know, there's so many, you know, disparate sources. Let's bring, you know, 35, 40 sources and aggregate and analyze and interpret. So here we go. So when it starts, you know, you, you send, fill out your information, the company. So there's a lot of things. And another thing too, a lot of AI tools are wrappers.

They're dependent on other tools. This is all your data. So this is not dependent on other tools. So this has your data, you own it and you can edit the information, you keep it, you have the profiles, you have access to these profiles. And so first off, you, you run your meeting brief and there's a whole process to go through to do that. Now what you get back, and there's many sections to this. I'm only going to show a few just for time's sake. But here's how to actually have this conversation and how to break it down and understanding what's going on in this company. You know, one of the things that it breaks down is all, all the different factors that this company is dealing with in their industry, what is, you know, historically, what things are happening now. So there's many, many different elements that are being analyzed here to give you the right topic and based on the person and their role, how to apply it. So that's the other thing. You know, I see a lot of companies that they provide tools to their team, but it's, it's more, here's what not to do, or I even see you can ask this to create an email for you or it's really, really simple. So you're not seeing like real sophisticated use of internal tools. And if you're working with a bigger company.

If you're at a bigger company, there's a lot of, you know, a lot of restrictions. Don't do this, don't do that, don't. And that's fine and it makes sense. But you know, the thing is, is how do you, how do you actually find what you need in that? And so there's a lot of limitations, a lot of don't do this, but what to do and how to use what you find. So that's, that's a big piece of this is here's all the information and here's what it means. And so there's other sections around that too. So like top points and, you know, how to apply this and how to map this to different things. So it gives you a whole pretty in depth roadmap. The other thing, and I just ran this on myself for, you know, I didn't want to run somebody else's information. But you know, you can also get an idea of the people that are in the meeting. So you can add all the people that are in the meeting and, and you can understand a little bit about them. Are they, you know, because I, I've been doing an analysis of LinkedIn profiles for a really long time and as we have moved into more automation and especially with ChatGPT, that was one thing that we, we built some tools around that. But you know, now we can really dig in. And so there's a lot of, you know, psychographic behavioral sources and we're able to take that and analyze it and merge that into, okay, this is what this means. So you've got that also crisis leadership indicators. So okay, this person and that. And that's really important because you can get an idea of a person like what, what they went through. So they were at this company while, you know, they had a huge riff or they went through this or they merged here and there was M and A activity or they came from this or you know, so there's all kinds of insights that you can get from that. Again, this, this goes on and then it can kind of, it kind of, it does, it will cross analyze the, the buying team. So that's really high value information. You have your AI coach, like let's say that you use some kind of selling methodology, it can aggregate all that and then you say, hey, I want to apply it to this. It'll give you a whole roadmap for it. Um, so the information that you're getting is very in depth, actionable, very rich content. So this is, this is what has been missing with meeting prep is being able to get in there and find out this, this multidimensional view of this prospect of the team, of the people in the meeting of the requirements, what you know about them, you know, technographic information about them, you know, historical industry knowledge, just in general, like some industries are slow adopters, some industries are under really heavy regulatory scrutiny. And what does that mean and how does that play out to your topic that you're, you're going to talk to them about? So all of these things are explained and actionable. So it's not like you're toggling through all these things trying to figure out something meaningful about it. So here we are going into 2026. You know, it feels like I just got used to writing 2025 on everything. I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way. But, yeah, this year went really fast. But, you know, if you look at the numbers I mentioned, so a decade ago, 82% of prospects felt like their reps weren't not as prepared as they would have wanted. So 10 years later, we're at 84%. But in the meantime, we've spent $50 billion on sales and marketing tech, and the number got worse. So, you know, there's a lot of factors involved. There's, you know, the amount of solutions that are out there, the amount of outreach that's out there. I mean, there's so much, the volume is so loud now to prospects that you've got to do it right. So there's not this, this tolerance for a bad meeting or for not being prepared or for wasting time. I mean, that's where stuff just goes dead after the. And so, you know, that's why this is built. So. And it's not built to just provide data. So the data, it's not the data itself. It's what to do with the data. It's how to interpret the data, how to put it into action so that you understand what this company like, what they're dealing with, how they're approaching things, how your prospects are involved in that. So there's so much. And we actually tap, and it took us 18 months to tap into every single possible data source that we're allowed to and then put it through frameworks of behavioral and historical and all these things that gives us the type of insight this has. And I know I've got folks using this on our beta team that are, you know, they're selling huge solutions and this is making a huge difference for them. So this QR code right here, I've still got some seats for our closed beta. So if you want to get on that list, go ahead and scan that, send an email. We're releasing it in January, so please connect. Come visit our booth. You know, we can run a couple of reports for folks if you stop by. And yeah, we're really, we're really excited about this. This is going to be a really good year and we're really looking forward to working with everybody. So, Gerhard, thank you again. It was really great to be here and we're looking forward to conversations over the next day. So everybody have a great day.