How to Take Meeting Notes People Will Actually Use📝 [Templates & Examples]
Templates, tips, and how-to's for taking meeting notes
June 27, 2019
Rob Lennon
Customer Education Lead at Hugo
Marketer and author with experience spanning a diverse 16 years in retail and SaaS startups across healthcare, mar-tech, and ad-tech, and productivity software sectors.
Productive meetings don’t happen on their own. From technology issues to conversations that go nowhere, most meeting inefficiencies are avoidable with proper planning.
Meeting notes are a prime example. If you’ve ever tried to take them, you may have struggled to transcribe everything without actually engaging in the meeting. Or, you may have written down a few vague bullet points, hoping it would crystallize into… something.
In either scenario, you’re not taking effective meeting notes––you’re just jotting stuff down.
These ineffective meeting notes may be the byproduct of ineffective meetings. If you want to take better meeting notes, your first job is to make sure you’re hosting effective meetings.
Your second job is to document what happens during meetings in a way that makes it clear for others to act on. Read on to learn how.
Listing every participant in the room is less about attendance than it is about transparency. If someone who didn’t attend has concerns about a meeting decision, for example, having an attendee list ready will help you to decipher who had a hand in making it.
✅ Note decisions, outcomes, and action items as they occur
There’s no reason to commit important meeting details to memory. Write down decisions, outcomes, and action items as they happen to guarantee clarity as the meeting progresses––and after it’s over.
✅ Forget about capturing everything
You’re likely to miss out on something important––like the group moving on without making a decision––if you try to capture everything word-for-word. When taking meeting notes, follow the Vital meetings framework and focus on what’s needed to move things forward: decisions, actions, and assignments.
✅ Collaborate in one document
Expecting attendees to take their own notes opens the door to misunderstandings. Instead, give everyone access to the same shared document so there’s one source of meeting note truth. Bonus: Participants can focus less on note taking and more on the issues at hand.
✅ Share meeting notes with all stakeholders
Keeping everyone in the loop means sharing meeting notes with folks who weren’t in the room. Just don’t rely on email as your only channel––Slack and other chat programs are great venues since they provide an immediate and direct way for all vested parties to push things forward.
✅ Create meeting note templates for repeatability
Templates afford you the ability to write meeting notes in a predefined format. Your meeting agenda is the ideal framework for turning one-off notes into a reusable template. The format is less important than making sure templates are shareable, actionable, and prepared in advance.
Meeting note templates and tips for specific teams
Developing templates for different meeting types helps teams extract the most value from their meeting efforts. With the right meeting note template, an effective meeting yields more than action items––it enables teams to capture critical business insights.
Here are tips and templates for taking better meeting notes across three of your most important teams: sales, customer success, and product.
How to take notes for Sales Meetings
Success in sales often comes down to asking the right questions and moving quickly to provide value. The following meeting note templates will help focus your sales meetings so you can uncover what to prioritize moving forward.
Sales Qualification
Qualifying leads is a time-consuming but necessary step towards building successful customer relationships. Sales teams that simplify the process can make effective judgments without chasing bad-fit deals.
Whether your team qualifies via cold call or during appointments, this sales qualification template streamlines the process by identifying what matters most when evaluating a lead’s potential to become a long term customer.
Sales Qualification Meeting Notes
Background
Get a high-level overview of the lead to gauge how well they match your ideal customer profile. What do they do? What industry are they in? How big is their company?
Context
How did they find out about us? What compelled them to approach us? Are they a referral? Did they see an ad?
Define Success
What are the prospect's main objectives and ideal outcomes (both qualitative and quantitative)? How does our product help?
Pain Points
What are the prospect's main pain points right now? Why are they seeking a solution now? What prevented them before?
Competition
How are they dealing with these challenges? Do they currently use any competing products or vendors? What other solutions are they evaluating?
Why Our Solution?
What unique value does our solution provide for the prospect? What benefits or features are they most interested in?
Timeline
What is the timeline for implementation? When does the potential customer need a solution in place by?
Budget
What are they currently spending on this issue? Do they have a budget allocated for it? If not, when do they expect they will?
Causes for Concern
Has the potential customer raised any concerns about our offering? What obstacles could crop up and derail implementation? How can we address these?
Other Helpful Notes
Are there any other topics or discussion points you should note and share with colleagues?
Main Takeaways
Do you qualify this lead as an ideal long-term successful customer? Why or why not?
Take Action
What are the next steps? Share key information and actionable steps with your team.
Most importantly, the template promotes alignment between team members as leads move through the sales funnel.
Sales Conversation
The right series of sales conversations turn qualified leads into customers. But steering leads through your sales funnel requires more than just talk.
It demands a thoughtful and systematic approach that connects your prospect’s pain points to your organization’s solution. This customizable sales conversation template is designed to do just that.
Sales Conversation Meeting Notes
Objective
What is the purpose of this meeting? How does it factor into our sales funnel? Is it for initial awareness or to close the sale? List any objectives or main talking points.
Quick Review
Give an overview of where this lead is in our sales process. Mention key context (goals, pain points, how our solution helps, timeline, etc.) that would allow other team members to gain an up-to-date, accurate understanding of the prospect.
Information Shared
What new information or material did you provide the prospect during this sales conversation?
Feedback
How was the new information received by the prospect? What was their response?
Positive Highlights
Note any substantial progress made during this sales conversation.
Risks & Red Flags
Identify any potential issues or concerns that could lead to prospect disengagement or undermine the sales potential.
Other Helpful Notes
Are there any other discussion points you should note and share with colleagues? Mention any changes or new information that could affect the sales or implementation process.
Main Takeaways
Where does the prospect now stand in our sales process? Why?
Take Action
What are the next steps? Share key information and actionable steps with your team and the prospect if necessary.
By balancing discovery questions with relevant information for leads, the template prepares sales teams to strike with purpose––and value––to close more deals.
Sharing and assignment functionality ensure everyone remains in the loop, transforming your sales cycle into a continuous process.
Customer Onboarding
The onboarding process plays a crucial role in customer retention. The more quickly your customers gain value from engaging with your product or service, the more likely they’ll be to stick around for the long haul.
That’s why having a customer onboarding template matters: It puts the focus of these critical meetings on helping customers to establish quick wins.
But proper onboarding isn’t limited to the short term. Once customers define what success means, your team can agree on an implementation path that not only identifies risks, but also unearths opportunities.
Customer Onboarding Meeting Notes
Define Success
What are the customer's main objectives and ideal outcomes? How does our product help? What challenges does it solve for them?
Implementation Strategy
Outline your process for achieving these primary goals. Include actionable steps toward time to first value and milestones afterward. The process should lead back to and align with their ideal outcomes as closely as possible.
Important Information
What features, processes, or aspects of your product does the client need to understand during the customer onboarding process? How can we make this as simple and stress-free as can be?
Set Expectations
Set expectations for each step of the customer onboarding process. Are there any potential setbacks or sticky points the client should be aware of? How will our team help?
Introduce Key Players
Introduce or brief the client on key team members they may interact with during their customer onboarding journey. Who can they reach out to with questions or concerns?
Customer Concerns / Risks
Did any issues or concerns arise during the customer onboarding meeting that could jeopardize engagement or retention? How can we mitigate these risks
Opportunities to Increase Engagement
Were any opportunities to increase spend or engagement identified during the initial customer onboarding meeting?
Main Takeaways
Create a list of takeaways for both your team and the customer. Assign actionable steps to your team. Share key information and implementation process with the customer.
Follow-Up
How will we keep the customer in the loop? Should we schedule a check-in?
By providing accountability and transparency, this meeting template will position your team to drive better results. To ensure team alignment around customer needs––and to set the stage for continued customer success––share it with people who weren’t involved in onboarding.
How to take notes for Customer Meetings
Long-term customer success rests on understanding and responding to your customer’s needs as they evolve. Meetings remain one of the most effective ways to capture customer sentiment.
The sales-to-customer success hand-off is one of the most important transitions in the customer journey. Without alignment between teams, customers are often left to fend for themselves––a recipe for disengagement and eventual churn.
Organizations that get it right anticipate and account for bumps in the road, using hand-off meetings as an opportunity to make the transition as smooth as possible.
This process is much easier with a customer hand-off template. It centralizes the most relevant customer information––unique priorities, work and communication styles, key KPIs––so that teams can understand clients better, achieve objectives faster, and earn trust quicker.
Customer Hand-off Meeting Notes
Team Information
Customer Success Manager:
Sales Team Member:
Other Key Stakeholders & Their Roles:
Customer Background
Customer Name:
Industry/Sector:
Company Size:
Contract Sign Date:
Contract Length:
Customer Goals
What is the main business objective of the customer? How do they generate revenue?
Why Our Solution?
What challenges or pain points does our product solve for the customer? What benefits or features are they most interested in?
Defining Success
How does the customer define success? What are the short-term objectives (and their steps) to help us get there?
Key Metrics
How do we measure success along the way? What metrics (such as Average MRR, # of Users, and other KPIs) should be discussed?
Work & Communication Style
What is the customer's ideal working relationship? What is the best way to contact them?
Growth Opportunities
How can we tailor the product or experience to better suit the customer?
Red Flags & Risks
Is the customer migrating from a competitor? Why? Were there any hesitations or hiccups encountered during the sales process? How can we ensure these don’t happen during and after the customer handoff?
Next Steps for Team
List all actionable steps and the team member responsible for each one. Refer to "Defining Success" section for help.
Next Steps for Customer
What are the next steps for the customer? Is any training required?
When everyone’s aligned, anyone can pick up right where you left off and take meaningful action where it matters the most. Customize it to fit any transfer.
Customer Check-in
Understanding customer needs requires checking in at regular intervals to see how they’re doing. When done right, customer check-ins empower your team to collect the information needed to deliver ongoing value.
An effective customer check-in template helps teams achieve this in a few ways. First, it identifies anything that’s changed since the last check-in. Second, it asks customers what isn’t working to determine areas for improvement and risks of churn.
Third, it invites customers to co-create goals before your next check-in––things your team can do to reduce or solve for whatever isn’t working.
Customer Check-in Meeting Notes
Review
What has changed since your last customer check-in? Review recent events and key metric updates to gain an up-to-date, accurate understanding of your client.
Positive Highlights
How has our team helped this client achieve their goals since their last customer check-in? How can we improve these factors?
Concerns, Shortcomings, or Risks
Does the customer have any problems with our products or services? Identify all risks that may lead to customer disengagement or churn.
Objectives for Next Meeting
What specific goals does the client want to achieve before the next customer check-in? How can we help?
Opportunities to Increase Engagement / Upsell
Are there opportunities to increase the value we provide this customer?
Key Takeaways
List all insights and actionables worth sharing with other departments.
Summary
In 1-2 sentences, summarize the current state of the customer so other team members can understand our relationship with them. Consider the information above, key metrics, and overall sentiment.
This proactive approach enables teams to itemize client issues and pinpoint solutions faster and with more accountability. Share it with colleagues––or better, sync it with your CRM––to provide everyone with a holistic overview of customer relationships and up the odds of continuous improvement.
Customer Feedback
Customer feedback sessions are vital to making sound product decisions. Whether you're a customer support member, product manager, or part of the UX research team, these meetings can provide unmatched insights into how to improve the user experience.
Acting on this feedback often translates to enhanced customer relationships and increased retention rates. But before your team can take meaningful action, they need to make sure they’re asking the right questions.
Customer Feedback Meeting Notes
Quick Review
What does the customer use our product for? What challenges does it solve?
Session Objective
What is the purpose of this meeting? Do you want to focus on certain aspects of the product?
General Product Performance
From 1-5, how well does our product suit the customer's needs?
Favorite Benefits
What are the customer's favorite features and benefits at the moment?
Room for Improvement
How can we make the customer's experience better? How would the customer change our product?
Feature Requests
Did the customer have any feature requests? Turn this list into tickets for the appropriate teams right from here.
Bugs
Did the customer mention any product bugs, errors, or issues? Share these with the appropriate teams right from here.
Key Takeaways
In 3 bullet points or less, what were your main insights from this customer feedback session?
Our customer feedback template helps make each customer conversation more meaningful by framing feedback in context. It’s also shareable so your entire organization can better understand the customer perspective and translate these insights into action.
How to take notes for Product Meetings
Successful product development requires a combination of customer feedback, quantitative data, and a well-oiled process. Meetings are often the glue that brings these elements together.
To maximize their effectiveness, we offer three unique templates designed for mission-critical steps to building and shipping features your customers will love.
User research
Your product won’t evolve without user research. And effective user research starts with effective note-taking.
To transform the qualitative insights gained from user research sessions into quantifiable trends, it helps to have a template. Our user research template simplifies the process, empowering your engineering, design, and product teams to drive impactful, positive change.
User Research Meeting Notes
Purpose
What is the main focus of this session (e.g., general performance, feature requests, product bugs)?
User Background
Relevant user information and demographics to understand the persona of the interviewee.
Response to Scripted Questions
List all planned questions for this particular user research study. Record the interviewee's response to each question.
Positive Highlights
Did the user mention any specific positive aspects in relation to the topic of this session?
Negative Feedback / Concerns
Did the user mention any specific negative aspects in relation to the topic of this session? How could we improve them?
Other Feedback
Did the user provide notable feedback outside the scope of this session that could help other business objectives?
Key Insights
Summarize the key insights that you learned from this user research session. If any are actionable, you can assign them to your team members right from here.
Notes / Quotes for Marketing
Were there any notes, quotes, or anecdotes that may assist marketing in their messaging to other users?
Whether you’re focusing on design enhancements or trying to refine features, our template can be customized to capture the data you need.
Sprint planning
Sprint planning is a team sport. To be successful, product owners, scrum masters, and agile team members must be aligned on everything––from agreeing on achievable goals to turning user stories into tasks.
With so many decisions to make and details to consider, these sessions require robust documentation. Whether you're combing through your backlog to determine what tasks need to be done or fleshing out epics around specific issues, our sprint planning template puts the focus on what you need to move forward.
Sprint Planning Meeting Notes
Sprint Goal
What is the main purpose of this sprint? Define key objectives below.
Sprint Backlog
What user stories match the sprint goal? Share this with your team prior to the meeting so they can contribute. Break each user story down into individual tasks. Make sure each task has as much information as possible. Include important metrics.
Epics to be Delivered
List out the epics that we're planning to start or deliver during this sprint.
Scope of Work Clarification
Revisit your definition of "done." Decide on the acceptance criteria that will be used to determine when each individual task is complete. Make sure all of this realistically aligns with your team's capacity.
Key Risks & Concerns
What potential issues could come up based on the goal and sprint backlog? How can we solve them? Does the scope of work allot enough time for unexpected issues
Notes and Takeaways
What were the main insights and discussion points from this sprint planning session?
Take Action
Get verbal confirmation from your team about the next steps to be taken. Clarify who's completing them and when they should be done by. Note this information here to share and assign.
Follow-Up
How will we keep in touch and stay up-to-date about progress? Should we schedule a follow-up meeting?
Sharing capabilities ensure everyone remains on the same page. Best of all, this sprint planning template allows you to turn notes into assignable action items by syncing with the tools you already use.
Product roadmap
In an ideal world, product roadmaps prevent product teams from going off-course. In the real world, competing priorities and misaligned objectives can send product strategy sessions into irrelevant and unproductive territory.
To keep product planning on track, your team must find the balance between the big picture and the seemingly small details that impact it. Our customizable product roadmap template helps teams organize their thinking around the high-level, long term vision and the steps needed to make it a reality.
Product Roadmap Meeting Notes
Capture Input
Do any key stakeholders have discussion points, insights, ideas, or requests to contribute? Share this template before the product roadmap meeting to gather feedback.
The Big Picture
With stakeholder input, develop a clear product vision by identifying the strategic goals most important to your organization. Examples include customer acquisition, churn reduction, technical improvements, upselling new services, etc.
Identifying Themes
What themes can be formed by grouping together the listed initiatives, features, and epics?
Prioritization
Why is each theme being pursued? What value does each one provide to the customer? Make sure to account for market space, customer data, and potential return on investment for each new project.
Execution Strategy
Break each initiative down into specific tasks, requirements, and deadlines. Confirm that each one is viable by allocating resources accordingly. Assign ownership and designate release dates.
Measuring Success
What metrics will you use to measure progress for each initiative? Define what success looks like.
Key Risks & Concerns
What potential issues could arise? How can we solve them? Does the scope of work allot enough time for unexpected issues?
Main Takeaways
What were the main insights from this product roadmap meeting? Include key decisions made, opportunities, and potential issues that should be shared with key stakeholders.
Visualization
Put together a visual aid for your roadmap. Ensure it communicates product direction and value to key stakeholders. Also, make sure that your engineering team can use it to see details and logistics clearly. Your roadmap should be dynamic so that it can easily evolve and adapt to changes over time.
Take Action
What can be done now? Who is responsible? Clarify next steps, who's completing them, and when they should be done by. Note this information here to share.
Share
List all key stakeholders not present and other departments that this information should be shared with.
Follow-Up
Now that plans have been set in motion, it's time to schedule meetings with other stakeholder parties to align them on what's coming next. Ensure that everyone is on the same page and plan roadmap check-ins for the future.
Tailor it to meet your needs and ensure your team remains on path. Assign action items in a few clicks to keep everyone accountable.
Get more meeting notes examples
All of these sample meeting notes templates come from our growing library of note and agenda templates for all sorts of meetings. You can get every template in the library as a Google Doc, Word Doc (.docx), or add them to a free Hugo account (meetings, notes, & tasks — all in one place).
Vital Meetings
A methodology for amazing meetings. Say goodbye to boring, long, and unproductive meetings.
Marketer and author with experience spanning a diverse 16 years in retail and SaaS startups across healthcare, mar-tech, and ad-tech, and productivity software sectors.
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