How To Be the Scribe in a Sales Meeting

The scribe is a critical role in sales meetings.

If you make team sales calls, it’s important that each person knows their role. Someone needs to lead the sales call, and the rest of the team needs to know what their role is in creating value in support of the lead salesperson.

But someone on the team needs to play the role of the scribe. Someone needs to take notes on who says what.

How to Take Notes

The scribe’s role is critically important. What your dream client says is a clue that it is important to them. So the scribe needs to write the person’s name and what they said. The scribe should also write any questions the stakeholder asked, as well as any comments or remarks they made in response to something somebody else on their team said. Later on these notes are to be critically important to you.

The notes you take our record of what stakeholder believes is important. It shares with you some idea it provides you with some idea of what they believe is important why they believe it’s important and what they need. Their questions provide an even greater insight into what your prospective client believes is important, and even more what they’re concerned about.

Later, when you are planning future sales meetings with this prospective client, developing a solution, or strategizing on how to win, you will find these notes extremely useful.

When You Get Back to the Office

When you get back to the office, review your notes. Write additional notes that capture your thoughts, ideas, and comments. Adding your thoughts to your notes will solidify your memory and help you develop an even greater strategy for winning.

But equally as important, these notes, especially the questions, give you an opportunity to communicate your interest in their business and your attention to detail.

By writing an email summarizing what you heard in the meeting and providing additional information to the responses to your dream clients questions, you prove that you were laser focused on what they needed, that you were listening, and that you understood the nature of their question and the underlying concern. Sending an email establishes you as someone who can be trusted, because you cared enough to listen, because you paid attention to details, and because you followed up.

What Note-Taking Communicates

I’ve seen salespeople in meetings with no pen or paper. I’ve seen salespeople in meetings with paper and pen without taking notes. I’ve seen these same salespeople struggle to remember the details of meetings and fail to follow-up on important points. But even more importantly, I’ve seen salespeople lose an opportunity to establish relationships with multi-million dollar prospective clients.

The role of the scribe is critically important. Sales interactions are too important not to capture.