The Meeting Minute

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Jeffrey Steinke, Author at Less Meeting

How to Follow Up on That Unanswered Meeting Request

Posted by | Business Tips, Meeting Tips | No Comments

Sometimes simply scheduling the meeting can be the hardest part.

    You were at an event last night and met Brett. He had some awesome ideas to help your startup so you got his card and he suggested you get together soon.
    The next day you email him to schedule a meeting but you never hear from Brett again.

You know you need to follow up with Brett but don’t want to annoy him in the process, which may stop him from helping you at all.

photo credit (creative commons)

How Do I Follow Up With Brett?

What people don’t realize is why the other person – Brett in this example – didn’t respond to the initial email.

Perhaps he never intended to help me out, but that’s simply unlikely. And even if that’s the case, an extra follow-up can’t make it any less likely that he’ll respond.

Here’s what’s more likely:

  • He never saw my email among the hundreds in his Inbox,
  • He started to respond but got sidetracked and then forgot altogether, or
  • He has a laundry list of stuff to do, and meeting with me just isn’t a high priority

So it’s ok to send follow-ups…it’s even necessary.

 

The obvious next question is, What do I say to Brett?

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New Less Meeting Release – Making Meetings Easier to Manage

Posted by | Using Less Meeting | No Comments

Our spring release is out the door and chances are you’ve already noticed some of the changes around Less Meeting.

We started simplifying the meeting interface and also added a couple highly requested features to manage meeting invites.

Meeting Agenda Templates

Do you have the same template you use on all your sales calls? Want to share a standard status meeting template with your whole team?

New agenda templates let you create a standard agenda template and even share it with your team.

Agenda Template

Click “edit agenda” and choose Use an existing template or Save a new one

 

Resend Agendas & Invites

Often times empty meeting invites are added to the calendar to block off someone’s time. One of the unfortunate side effects of too many meetings!

We realize this is unavoidable, though, so want to make it easier for you to update meetings and communicate that to the rest of your team. Introducing the ability to send an updated meeting invite (including the .ICS file) and the ability to send the updated agenda to your attendees.

Updating the Meeting Invite

Updating the Meeting Invite

Update Invite

Check “Email Calendar Update” to resend the invite to attendees

Agenda Updates

Send your updated agenda to attendees

Simpler, Cleaner Notes & Minutes Interfaces

You’ll notice that the note taking interface is now more clean and inviting. We’ve cleaned out a lot of the noise including the multiple text boxes and excess labels. The result is a notes section letting you focus on what matters – the notes.

We’ve taken the popular drag & drop styles from the mobile apps and applied these to the web, so you should find it easier to drag & drop your notes, as well as the green note icon. Click & hold on any note – or the green note icon itself – and drag it to wherever you want it.

And when it’s time to send the meeting minutes, you’ll also notice a newly redesigned popup.

Sending Minutes

The redesigned Meeting Minutes interface

 

New PDF Export Format

Continuing with the theme of cleaner and simpler, the export to PDF has also been redesigned to match the styling of the export to Word.

Note that if the meeting hasn’t started you’ll still see the old format, which is designed for offline users who need to take notes by hand and enter them back into Less Meeting later.

Undo Deleted Meetings

Delete a meeting on accident?

Here’s how you can add back, or undelete, any of your meetings:

  1. Visit your Meetings page and check the “Deleted/Declined” filter option
  2. Click the “Remove Meetings” link
  3. You’ll notice a green “+” icon next to your deleted meeting – click this and your meeting will be re-added
Undelete meeting

Click the green “+” icon to readd your meeting

 

Let us know what you think of all these new features and as always, thanks for all the feedback that helped us plan this release.

 

Less Meeting Update #3 – Improved Calendar Sync & Outlook 2013 Support

Posted by | Features Update | No Comments
As we wrap up our series on our latest release we have two under-the-hood calendar sync updates we’re excited to announce.

1. Improved Calendar Integration

We’re consistently improving the calendar sync feature so that the meetings you see in Less Meeting match up with your calendar.While we’ve made a number of incremental updates in the past we’ve done a major overhaul this time around. Note that this will only affect new meetings that you schedule.No action is needed to set this up – you’ll start seeing the improvements automatically!

2. Outlook 2013 Beta

We’re excited to announce our Beta release for Outlook 2013. To get started download the latest version of the Less Meeting Outlook Add-in here. If you run into issues please contact us to let us know.Note that unfortunately touch screen computers are not supported yet.And of course Outlook 2007 & 2010 users will still get the same great add-in you always have.


New to Less Meeting?Click here to learn how the Less Meeting Outlook Add-in can help you reinvent the way you plan, run and follow up on your meetings.

Less Meeting Update #2 – International Date Support, Meeting Search & Teams

Posted by | Features Update | No Comments

Continuing with the updates from our latest release we have three more new features to show off.

1. International Date Support

We’re very excited to start displaying meeting dates & times in your localized format. Want your time shown in “dd/mm/yyyy” instead of “mm/dd/yyyy” format? No problem!Even better, these settings are automatically detected from your browser so no additional action is needed on your end. You’ll start seeing your localized meeting date & time formats the next time you login to Less Meeting.

Bonus feature: Daily Digest emails will now be sent at 7am in your local time zone!

2. Enhanced Meeting Search

On the Meetings Page you can now search for any meeting related items. Most importantly search now includes all past meeting notes, decisions, and action items.You’ll also notice our new search engine is much faster.

Want some advanced search tricks? Try these:

  • “-” to exclude a term from search (e.g. “-status”)
  • “+” to require a term in your search (e.g. “+status”)
  • “*” use as a wildcard (e.g. “statu*”)

3. Improved Team Privacy

Privacy and security is top of mind for us. In addition to our long list of existing security measures, we’ve added additional features to control to what meeting info is accessible to Less Meeting Teams.

In particular you’ll notice that all Teams now require a “Filter Tag” and Team Members must all be on the same License Pack.


New to Less Meeting?Click here to learn how Less Meeting helps you & your teams, no matter where in the world you’re located, start reinventing the way you plan, run and follow up on your meetings.