The 11 common types of meetings

1. Interviews

Regardless of whether you're a full-time recruiter or a hiring manager in a corporate HR department, one of your jobs is to scout for talent. After you successfully go through multiple resumes and shortlist the best candidates, interviews offer the critical opportunity to meet with these potential hires face to face before making your final placements.

Interviews help you to understand your candidates better and critically analyze who will match the requirements for the role. Your discernment about the candidate and their skills during the interview plays a crucial factor towards the growth of an organization. If you're staffing for multiple clients, this means that your brand reputation is on the line with every interview you schedule. For internal HR teams, a smooth interview process plays directly into new hire retention and engagement.

Candidates understanding the culture of the organization they're joining is also important during the interview. Not only does this give them a better idea of what strengths they can bring to the work environment, but it gives you insight into whether a candidate will be a good match.

All that said, successful interviews are about more than just the questions and conversation. Scheduling interviews can be a time sink for both you and your candidates, and if managed poorly, it can also create a bad first impression with your top matches. Scheduling software like Zoho Bookings allows your candidates to book their interviews from your available time slots directly and even participate in one-way or live video interviews through integrations.

2. Sales meetings

In business, selling is crucial. It helps your organization to survive and drive revenue. To stay ahead of your competitors, it's essential to refine your sales strategies internally and confidently execute them with target audience. Meeting with your sales team, leads, and users can be an effective way to close communication gaps and improve customer satisfaction.

If you're communicating with your customers through back-and-forth emails and endless phone calls to agree upon a time to meet, you're wasting valuable time that can be spent preparing an awesome sales pitch. Having an online appointment scheduling software like Zoho Bookings will allow your customers to request appointments themselves. Not only does this increase customer satisfaction, but it gives you time to focus on selling.

Related read: We've listed the 10 best meeting schedulers that will help you to streamline your meetings.

3. Customer services meetings

If you run a service-based business, meeting with your customers is inevitable. Unlike other meeting types we discuss in this article, services directly generate revenue for those offering them. Instead of being just one part of a long cycle of interaction, this meeting is the product, and you have to impress a customer in a comparatively short amount of time.

For these meetings, learn as much as you can about your target audience. Listen to their pain points, provide a clear plan to solve them in the allotted timeframe, and then execute well. This applies to any service-based product, whether offered virtually through a custom website, or in person at a brick-and-mortar shop.

While online scheduling software can help simplify all the meeting types, it is especially vital for service meetings. When customers are right on the edge of making a purchase, you don't want to make it difficult for them to convert. With Zoho Bookings, you can list your available services and time slots, and customers can easily register for the one of their choice. Collect payments, send automated confirmations, and remind customers about their upcoming appointments right from a single app.

Related read: learn how you can enhance your meeting invite emails

4. Consultations

For any consultant to demonstrate their expertise with their customers, whether that's businesses or individuals, they have to meet with them quite often. This makes them similar to service meetings, but each interaction is just one part of the product. For example, consultants may offer expert guidance, prepare a business or action plan, provide constructive feedback, or solve issues directly—but this will happen in a matter of days, weeks, or even months rather than hours.

This means that your time (and your customers' time!) is on the line more than ever. Each meeting must build on the previous one, maintaining productivity and momentum so customers don't feel as though their time is being wasted.

Scheduling plays a huge role in how smooth your client's experience will be. If they are having to hunt you down via email or phone call to schedule each additional meeting, then they will be more likely to move on to one of your competitors. Zoho Bookings not only helps you schedule multiple meetings ahead of time, but you can also meet with customers virtually through Zoho Meeting or Zoom. Consult with your customers without worrying about double-bookings or no-shows.

5. Webinars

Webinars are usually online meetings with multiple people. You can reach out to your employees or your customers through a webinar for different purposes, such as educating, training, launching a product, weekly/monthly company meetings, or updates. Like other meetings, the product you're selling here is the information you provide, but the goal is to build a stronger organizational community with employees, customers, and prospects alike.

Webinars are already hosted digitally, so an online scheduling platform is a no-brainer. Many platforms will also integrate with your webinar hosting solution, like Zoho Meeting, Zoho ShowTime, or Zoom Meeting.

6. Project meetings

Projects often require internal meetings that start right from the inception of a project and continue until its successful completion. These meetings are more or less like a compass that helps your project progress in the right direction. During them, your teams, customers, and board members will meet under different circumstances to discuss important aspects of the project and make any necessary decisions required to finish the project successfully.

Here's some food for thought: almost any meeting can be considered a project meeting. For example, interviews can be a part of hiring projects, and consultations can be classified as a small part of sales meetings.

This opens up another set of meetings types that are closely correlated with project meetings. While the meetings mentioned below are internal in nature, they can also be a part of the other external meeting types we've seen so far.

7. Status update meeting

Status update meetings allow team members to catch up and discuss project status, related challenges, and goals for the week or the month ahead. The meeting interval can vary depending on the project and team needs. This meeting type helps keep the momentum going, and it primarily focuses on maintaining project direction, resolving challenges, and revising the action plan.

8. Decision-making meeting

It's essential to keep all necessary parties in the loop while making important decisions within an organization. Whether you're hiring, plotting a new course of action, or even determining contingency plans, a decision-making meeting should focus on discussing what's at stake, coming to a unified agreement, and finishing the session with a blueprint for future action.

9. Problem-solving meeting

Simply put, these types of meetings allow teams to evaluate challenges and find solutions. It's common for organizations to develop issues that need immediate attention, and teams can use problem-solving meetings to address these concerns. While it may seem easier for individual team members to find short-term fixes on their own, the chances of problems recurring at a later stage are often higher. Instead, it's best for teams to collaborate in discovering the optimal solution.

10. Team-building meeting

Team-building meetings are key to solidifying connections and improving collaboration. It's best to engage team members with fun activities that focus on developing clear communication and breaking down barriers. This leads to a stronger work culture and increased motivation among employees.

11. Innovation meeting

During innovation meetings, team members can brainstorm and build upon shared ideas to bring a fresh approach to their workflow. When businesses take steps to promote new ideas, they're able to break from the monotony and expand their horizons. The goal of this meeting type is to uncover insights and develop new strategies for your business.