MAPs: The Essential Automation Tool You’ve Never Heard Of

by Nicole Speciale

A Market in Transition

Enterprise growth is a catch-22 for business communications: while regular correspondence is essential for scaling a business, it becomes more challenging to organize and coordinate meetings as business takes off. The calendaring tools enterprises may be familiar with pose certain limitations, and consistently taking ideal steps before, during, and after meetings is challenging when coordinated manually. This is all about to change.

Meeting automation platforms (MAPs) offer an automated, focused, and integrated alternative that will greatly enhance B2B interactions.

What Is a Meeting Automation Platform?

A meeting automation platform (MAP) is an application that automates the management of quantifiable activities associated with pre-meeting planning and logistics, in-meeting monitoring, and post-meeting analysis and follow-up. Critical data is locked within calendars, spreadsheets, and other collaboration offerings and MAPs allow enterprises to unlock these valuable insights. MAPs provide scalability options to match enterprise needs and leverage cloud-based deployment. Key capabilities of MAPs include:

• Automated scheduling
• Automated management
• Automated analytics
• Integrations via APIs
• Mobile-first apps for ease of use
• Role-based security
• Compliance to ensure that regulations, such as GDPR, are supported
• Enterprise scalability to thousands and millions of meetings
• Digitize meeting data for tracking from marketing and sales management software

Benefits of MAPs

Ultimately, a meeting automation platform is able to accelerate business growth by improving the efficiency of a B2B meeting strategy. Aragon thinks that in the future, MAPs will provide the ability to recommend the meetings necessary to drive particular outcomes. Tactical benefits of MAPs can be broken down into two categories: efficiency and effectiveness.

Efficiency:

• Increased volume of B2B meetings (by up to 200% based on studies of enterprise adoption of MAPs)
• Reduced human error due to automation of some scheduling, rescheduling, and ongoing communications tasks
• Seamless integration with existing tools to leverage existing data and update data and workflows in complementary applications

Effectiveness:

• More qualified meetings per event based on the automation of candidate selection and personalized content matching
• Increased customer satisfaction based on monitoring and responding to customer/partner behavior before, during, and after meetings
• Improved compliance by automating the processes and providing a visible audit trail

Jifflenow: Helping Accomplish Critical Objectives

One emerging MAP provider, Jifflenow (based in San Jose, California and led by CEO Hari Shetty), provides a solution for B2B meeting planning, scheduling, management, and analysis. Jifflenow uses analytics to track progress toward specific business objectives. From Google G Suite to Microsoft Office to Salesforce, Jifflenow integrates with a range of major enterprise solutions.

It is time to get serious about smart meeting coordination. Leveraging an MAP provider offers a competitive advantage as enterprises cannot afford to lose business due to subpar meeting organization. Meeting automation platforms may not yet be on everyone’s radar, but they are quickly carving out space for themselves as a valuable and strategic business tool. Integrated meeting automation is the way forward.