Meeting Automation: Save an Hour a Day with 5 Simple Workflows

The problem with meetings isn't the actual conversation, but rather the admin work that comes with it.

Whether it's sales, project kick-offs, or research, there is immense value in bringing the right people together in a Zoom call. Everyone gets aligned on the next steps, questions are answered, insights are shared, and the deal moves one step closer to closing.

But here's the catch: to truly benefit from your meetings, there's some necessary admin work involved. This includes tasks like note-taking, data entry into CRM systems, and sharing meeting summaries, among other things.

However, what if we told you there's a way to automate these manual admin tasks? With automation, you can seamlessly move from one call to another without worrying about forgetting essential information or letting important tasks slip away.

Interested? Let’s dive in!

Setting up Grain 

Before we dive into automating your meeting workflows, let's take a moment to set up the tool you need to get the job done: Grain.

Grain provides AI-powered recording for everyone. It allows you to capture and share key moments from your video meetings with AI, seamlessly integrating them into your everyday tools.

Setting up your Grain workspace is quite simple.

Go to Grain.com > Sign up using Google or Outlook account > Connect your calendar  > Create a new Grain workspace (or join an existing one if your team is already using Grain).

Let’s get Grain AI to do the manual admin job so that you can focus on what matters.

Automate Recording and Transcription

If you're not already doing so, it's highly recommended to record and transcribe your meetings, especially those with prospects and customers. Instead of manually handling this for each call, you can ask Grain to only join the meetings you’d like to record.

Here’s how. 

Go to ‘Today’ > Recording Settings > Choose 'Record all my meetings' if you want to record all your meetings. If you prefer to record only customer meetings, select 'Auto record some of my meetings' and then 'Record all meetings with external participants.'

That's it! Once the meeting begins, Grain will automatically join, record, and transcribe the conversation in real-time, even if you're not the host.

“Grain allows us to record all of our sales calls and project management calls thereby making sure that we never forget to record an important meeting and scramble for data afterward.”

- Oliver C, Account Executive. 

After the meeting concludes, you can access the video and a transcript of the conversation in 'My Library'. This makes it easier to listen to the call, search the transcript for specific moments, and clip and share key moments as needed.

Automate Note-taking

As we hinted earlier, meetings are often filled with valuable information and insights that you may want to revisit and share with your team. That's why you'll find advice emphasizing the importance of taking notes when it comes to running productive meetings.

While we understand the value of taking notes during meetings, we believe it may not be the most effective approach for a couple of reasons:

• Note-taking can distract you from actively listening to your customers or team members.
• Written text notes may not capture all the nuances and context accurately. They often reflect the note-taker's interpretation and conclusions based on what they heard.
• Notes can be challenging to share and comprehend as time passes by.

With Grain, you can automate note-taking effortlessly. When a meeting begins, Grain will automatically join the call (unless you've adjusted your ‘Recording Settings’ to disable it) to capture, analyze, and summarize the conversation using AI.

"Now, with just one click, I'm locked in with an intuitively organized snapshot of all the key points that were discussed."

- Jenna S, Customer Success, Jasper.ai.

Once the meeting ends, you’ll get an accurate Summary, Key points with timestamps easily navigate back to specific moments in the video, and Next Steps. Want to share them? Just click “Copy Notes” and paste them anywhere you’d like in a click. 

Next time you need to send a meeting recap or create meeting minutes, all you have to do is "copy and paste." 

Automatically Share Meeting Recordings

How often do you share your meetings with your team? For most of us, it's a daily occurrence. 

Whether it's because someone couldn't join the call or because we want to keep everyone informed, we tend to share recordings regularly. However, it can be easy to forget to do it manually amidst all our other tasks.

But there's a solution: automate it.

With Grain, when you record your meetings, they are automatically shared with your team as long as they're part of your Grain workspace. The best part? It's free to invite your team to Grain. Whenever anyone needs access to a meeting recording, they can simply search and find it in Grain without any assistance.

By inviting your team to your Grain workspace, you give them access to a library of your meetings. Additionally, they can also contribute by recording their calls and adding to the team's library.

PartnerHero, for example, uses Grain to create and share a library of meetings with their team.

And to top it off, you have control over which meetings are shared by default and which ones you prefer to keep private. Just customize your preferences in the 'Recording Settings' section. It's that simple.

Automatically Send Meeting Recaps

When it comes to sharing meeting content, a full video recording may not always be necessary. If you're dropping a link to an hour-long call, think again. In many cases, your team is simply looking for a summary of the meeting highlights. 

As we’re using Grain to generate AI-powered summaries of your meetings, let's explore how to set up automation to send these summaries to your team.

Head over to Automation> Slack and click on “Get Started” and connect Grain with your Slack workspace.

In the next step, you have the option to select which meetings you want to share and choose where you'd like to share them. 

You can use filters based on the Owner (host), People (participants), and Tags to narrow down the specific meetings you want to send. For example, if you want to send meetings involving a particular customer to a Slack channel, you can use the People filter. Then, you can search for and select the desired Slack channel where you want the AI-generated meeting summaries to be sent.

Voila! Every time you have a call that meets certain conditions you have specified, such as a meeting with specific customers, Grain will automatically share the AI-generated summary and important points with your team via Slack.

"Grain helps me share feedback and customer insights with the right teams through Slack."

- Shareil Nariman, Head of Customer Success at Arrows.

Here’s an example.

Every day, our product and engineering team gathers for a quick stand-up meeting to discuss what's important, any potential problems, and tasks that rely on each other. Once the meeting ends, Grain automatically sends a summary written by AI, highlighting the key points and things we need to do, to the #daily-check-in channel. This helps everyone stay accountable and keeps everyone in the loop. It also lets us continue the conversation at our own pace, even if we're not all available at the same time.

Automate CRM Call Logging

Salespeople spend less than half of their time on selling. According to HubSpot, 32% of reps spend an hour or more every day entering data into their CRM or sales tool. Salesforce reports that only 28% of their week is dedicated to selling, with the majority of time consumed by other tasks such as deal management and data entry.

Let's put the numbers aside. We both know that salespeople have to manually take notes and update their CRM records after every customer interaction, especially meetings. Without updating deal records, you won't fully benefit from your CRM.

To save time on admin work, empower your team to automatically update CRM records using Grain.

Here's how:

Go to Automation > HubSpot and connect Grain with your HubSpot account. 

Whenever you have a meeting with a prospect or an existing customer, Grain automatically generates an AI-powered summary, identifies key points with timestamps, and updates your Contact and Deal notes once the meeting ends.

With Grain, your sales and customer success teams can focus more on talking to customers and closing deals, and spend less time on administrative tasks.

“I save up to 25 minutes after every sales call as Grain automatically generates and adds the call notes in HubSpot for me."

- Max Stoiber, Founder and CEO, Stellate. 

Start Automating Your Meeting Workflows

Meetings aren't always the real problem. It's the admin work that follows.

Set up automation to focus more on the work that truly matters and spend less time on admin tasks. Grain makes it incredibly easy to automate up to 90% of your admin work and repetitive actions with just a few clicks.

Want to go beyond the basics? You can also connect Grain with over 5,000 tools through Zapier and seamlessly transfer important information to the platforms that matter most to you. Example? Automatically capture and send action items to tools like Asana.

Start simple and gradually scale up as you become more familiar with setting up automation.