Meeting Culture, No-Shows, & A Smarter 2026

Tick tock, tick tock. Not the social app. The sound of our days marching across rows of 30 and 60 minute blocks in our digital calendars. This year I was stood up for 10 meetings. All but one were requested by prospects. One miss was on me. I booked my own slot and forgot to invite the other person. I waited, got annoyed, then realized my mistake.

Our clients see the same pattern. CSMs prepare for quarterly business review (QBRs) and the decision makers do not arrive. So let’s ask hard questions:

• Are we getting the right people in the room?
• Are agendas clear and tied to decisions?
• Are we scheduling with time zones, seasonality, and escalation context in mind?
• Or are we all just living with meeting fatigue?

It is human to be late or miss one. When it becomes a theme, it is a signal of disrespect and poor time management. The fix starts with data, not feelings.

Benchmark Bites From The State Of Meetings Report*

Use these to calibrate your team norms:

• U.S. workers now spend at least 20 percent of their week in meetings. Senior leaders spend about 35 percent. Time rises with company size. Tuesdays hold the heaviest load.
  
• Efficiency drops when attendee lists creep above seven. At large companies, 22 percent of meetings cross the inefficiency threshold of eight or more people.
• Medium sized companies book the most meetings longer than 30 minutes. Consider 25-minute sprints for focus.
• AI in meetings surged 17x, driven by recording, transcription, and decision capture.

*Source: Fellow’s State of Meetings Report: Fellow.ai.

Try A Simple Time Study In Q1

Time tracking tells a different story than the one in our heads. Pick one team. Run the time study for four weeks. Publish what you learned. Adjust the playbook. Repeat quarterly. Try these options:

• If you have a professional services automation (PSA) or work management tool (e.g. Rocketlane, Kantata, Certinia, or Smartsheet), tag meetings by internal vs external, decision vs status, and planned vs ad hoc. I’m newly using the Rocketlane Google Calendar connector feature and it’s a game changer for someone like me who finds time tracking tedious (do as I say, not as I do).
• If you do not track time: Export a CSV from your calendar and feed it to an LLM to produce telemetry by duration, attendees, and outcomes. Shoutout to Daphne Costa Lopez who did this last week and surfaced that she averages 6.3 meetings a day.
• Compare the narrative to the numbers. Where do you see high time, low value? Where are key stakeholders missing or overrepresented?

Three Practical Moves For Fewer No-Shows And Better Outcomes

1. Make the invite do the heavy lifting. Title the meeting with a verb and a decision. Example: “Approve Q1 Success Plan: 3 tradeoffs.” Paste the agenda and pre-reads directly in the event.
2. Double opt-in and reconfirm. Use a 24-hour auto-reminder with the agenda. If the decider declines, reschedule rather than proceed without them.
3. Right-size attendance. Cap decision meetings at seven people. If more need awareness, send a written update or a recording after.

A 2025 Retrospective And 2026 Intention

Post-sales work lives inside change. Do not let variability prevent you from a quarterly recalibration. Try an SSK exercise: 

• Stop: status updates that belong in Slack or docs.
• Start: decision memos before live discussion.
• Keep: customer-facing reviews that drive renewals and expansion.

Need A Jumpstart?

We help B2B tech companies audit their current state, design AI-driven workflows, and execute meeting-to-outcome systems across CS, PS, and RevOps. If you want an external partner to run a rapid meeting culture assessment and implement the fixes, reply to this email for a 30-minute mini assessment.

Our Customers & Friends Are Hiring

Community Member Spotlight

Meet Revenue and Growth Leader:

Brandon Brumfield

[Former] Managing Director, Customer Success at Microsoft

Brandon's Fun Fact: I have a goal of obtaining my pilot license/certification in 2026 (I have an insatiable sense of curiosity, especially regarding aviation).

Brandon's Interests & Passions: I thoroughly enjoy taking big problems, developing big ideas to solve them, building a consumable action plan to address this, and monitoring results.  It can be a complexed customer or business issue, or it can be how we rearrange my daughter's room to accommodate her new, ridiculously large, fish tank that I got her for her birthday.

How Brandon is Moving Mountains: I’m building a Customer Success strategy grounded in three pillars: Customer Excellence, Operational Excellence, and Delivery Excellence. Which are designed to transform CS from a reactive function into a scalable growth engine. By aligning people, processes, and execution, this approach drives stronger customer outcomes, empowers teams, and delivers measurable, long-term impact.

Fun Challenges Brandon has Solved: This year, many CS managers struggled to connect with customers adopting AI because they weren’t experiencing the same challenges firsthand, limiting empathy and value-based conversations. By embedding AI into daily CS workflows and fostering hands-on learning through internal hackathons, we closed that gap and created AI-enabled CS leaders who engage customers as credible, empathetic strategic partners.

Thank you for Joining Us at CS Angel Demo Day

Early Insights Into the Next Generation of CS Innovation

Last week, we had the pleasure of welcoming a small group of Customer Success leaders into our Irvine headquarters for an exclusive CS Angel Demo Day watch party.

We kicked off the day with great coffee from our onsite MoonGoat Coffee, even better conversations, and front-row access to the next wave of CS tech.

If you weren’t able to join us this time, more opportunities to connect are ahead. We’re already planning new events and experiences for 2026, and we can’t wait to share what’s coming next.