💃 Death by Meetings 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Love meetings??

Then delete this email 🙂.

Want to be in less meetings?

Then read closely ⬇️

NO ESCAPE, FOR SOME

Exceptions

80% of you fall into the meeting-heavy category.

But, there are outliers. Exceptions.

Here are the bookends of the meeting-volume spectrum:

Senior Managers, Directors, VPs, and Executives

These senior roles are bound to meetings 😭.

🥵 Meetings. Meetings. Meetings. This is the job. Sorry.

🥵 You are leverage. Your plethora of meetings are intaking things to be levered, and outputting to your team to execute, ie leverage. You’re a maxed out credit card that gets paid off and then gets maxed again, and the cycle repeats 🔄. If that sounds exhausting…can confirm, it is.

🥵 The better you get at it, the more meetings you’re in 😩…at least you get paid more 🤑😅.

Interns, Juniors, New-hires

These junior roles are spared…..for now.

😃 You’re too unreliable, unproven, and, frankly, too risky to put in front of stakeholders in meetings. It’s not a bad thing 🤷🏻. It just is what it is. Enjoy this time, because as you progress, so too will your meeting invites!

😃 You need to learn and earn your way into meetings. Offer to take notes. Listen intently. Be engaged mentally. Write down questions to ask your manager after the call.

😃 Make yourself useful, not just a fly on the wall. With the notes you’ve taken, create a summary. Objective, action items, callouts/risks, and meeting notes. Send them out the attendees post-meeting (perhaps after a review from a trusted coworker 😉).

WHAT IS IT?

How To Avoid Death By Meetings

For the 80% of you who are between very junior and very senior, there are strategies and tactics to influence where meetings fall in your priorities list.

First, there are the simple methods to protect your calendar, like blocking out “focus time.” This is effective, and even encouraged in healthy work environments.

If you’re a bit more ambitious, then continue reading 🙂.

🧭Move the Needle

Do great work for your stakeholders 🤝. Be effective 📈. Build a track record of success 🏆.

You know that one salesperson, who doesn’t have to enter their leads?

In fact, they have a administrative resource who enters their leads and updates the CRM for them?

They earned that concession because they are making the company significantly more money than other salespeople. The distance they’ve moved the revenue-needle is the scoreboard they point to 🫵 when people question their privilege.

Be the Salesforce version of that 🤩.

🥛Utilization

This one is most relevant to consultants. You have your 80-100% utilization requirement.

Hit it 🎯. Exceed it 🚀.

And if you’re on the bench or light in client work, then you need to search out the next-best non-billable things you can do - demos, documentation, scoping docs, etc.

Hitting your utilization metrics goes a long way in being selective in what meetings you do, and do not, attend 💯.

If your manager is deciding your meeting attendance to “The Current State of AI, part 7” internal meeting versus your $250/hr solution architecture session, you’ve given them an easy choice and gotten yourself out of a meeting.

🤩Make your Manager Look Good

When your clients and stakeholders are sending your managers testimonials about you, it’s like getting a child being sent home a happy-gram from school - bragging rights for your parents to other parents and proud calls to the grandparents.

When you’re in the top-3 of billables for the last 12 months, your manager is getting a ton of props in the capacity planning meetings.

When your manager is getting a ton of props and good vibes directly because of you, then you will have more power and control over your day. Sounds nice, right?

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Unless you’re a very senior or very junior resource, you will be spending significant time in meetings.

Some of it is necessary…valuable, even!

But it’s a slippery slope, and you can quickly find your calendar looking like a game of Tetris.

Control your space. Control your time.

You won’t get out of every meeting, but the practice of setting yourself up to control the things, despite all the friction, is how leaders are made.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes