"Does It Take Notes as Well as I Do?" The Six-Month Test for Meeting Notes
by Oscar Uribe
Halfway through a meeting with us this summer, the founder of a CRM consultancy stopped and pointed at the notepad in front of them.
"I know I have an AI transcribing this meeting, and I'm still sitting here taking notes."
Then the founder said what a lot of experienced sellers think and rarely say out loud: you have to let go. They knew it, and they still weren't ready to.
Their business runs on long dialogues. A head of sales we spoke with, in the same kind of business, put it plainly: "Notes and follow-up are everything to me. People I spoke to a year ago are becoming customers now." That's not an objection to AI. It's a very precise question: will the note still be useful when I need it, which might be next spring?
Most notetakers are sold on a different question. That's why so many experienced reps keep their notepad.
A summary is not a note
A summary answers what was this meeting about? It's written for someone who wasn't there, and it's most useful the same afternoon.
A note answers what do I need to know before I talk to these people again? It's written for your future self, who has had two hundred conversations since, and who may be opening the record for the first time in six months because the buyer just emailed: "We're ready to look at this again."
Those are different documents. A sales manager at a large company told us their meetings are already recorded in Teams and summarized by Copilot, and asked, fairly, what a dedicated meeting bot would add. If the bar is a summary, nothing much. Summaries are a commodity now.
The bar for a seller in a long cycle is higher. Call it the six-month test.
The six-month test
Open a record from a meeting half a year ago. Read only what was saved. Don't listen to the recording, don't ask a colleague. Can you answer these?
1. What did the buyer actually say about the things that matter? Not "customer expressed interest in a Q1 start." Their sentence: "If the migration slips past February, this goes to next year's budget." Paraphrase loses the condition, the hedge and the tone, and those are exactly what you need when you call back.
2. Who said it? Six months is long enough for the champion to change jobs. If you know the CFO said "we need this" and the IT manager said "not before the migration," you know who to call first and what to open with. If the record says "they," you don't.
3. Who promised what, by when? Both sides. "We'll send a reference from a company your size" and "I'll check with the board after the 15th." Commitments are what a relationship is built on. A buyer remembers the one you didn't keep.
4. What was decided, and what was left open? "Agreed to pilot with one team" is a decision. "Pricing model still to be discussed" is an open thread. Six months later, the open threads are the agenda.
5. Why did we meet, and did it work? Every meeting has a purpose. Get to the decision maker, agree on a pilot, survive a procurement review. Knowing whether it was met tells you where the deal really stands, whatever the stage in the CRM says.
6. What changed since the time before? A single meeting rarely tells the story. The movement does: a new person joined, the timeline moved, the budget question went from "no" to "maybe."
7. Where is it? If the answer is "in my notebook" or "in my inbox somewhere," the note fails the test the day you're on holiday, or the day you hand the account to someone else.
Handwritten notes fail the same test
Here's the uncomfortable part for the founder with the notepad. The notepad fails too, just in other places.
Notes written by hand during a meeting are written while you're also listening, thinking and steering. They capture what felt important in the moment, in shorthand that made sense that day. The exact words are the first thing to go, because you can't write and listen at the same time. Commitments you made yourself are often missing, because you weren't thinking of them as anything to write down. And the notes live where you put them, which is usually somewhere only you can find.
The founder also described what they get on the days they do let go: "Not much gets missed. And you can relax about the 'you have to remember this, you have to remember this' and focus on the actual conversation and the customer."
That's the real trade. Not the AI's notes against yours. A conversation where half your attention is on the pen, against one where all of it is on the buyer.
How to let go without losing anything
Don't stop writing because a vendor told you to. Stop because you checked. This works for any notetaker, ours included.
- Run both for two weeks. Keep your own notes and let the notetaker run. Don't compare them the same day. Compare them a month later, when you've forgotten the meeting.
- Apply the six-month test to both. For each meeting, answer the seven questions from each record. Count which one answers more of them.
- Check the details that break in the Nordics. Does it handle Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or Finnish, and a meeting that switches language halfway? Does it get the names right? When it can't tell who spoke, does it say so, or does it guess?
- Check where it ends up. A perfect record that lives in a separate app nobody opens fails question 7. Find out what reaches your CRM and what doesn't, before you rely on it.
- Keep writing one thing: your judgment. A notetaker records what was said. It can't record what you sensed. "I don't think the CFO is the real decision maker." "The IT manager went quiet when we mentioned the timeline." Write that line yourself, every time. It takes ten seconds, and it's the part of the note that only you can add.
- Tell people the bot is there. Mention it when you send the invite and again when the meeting starts. Most buyers don't mind a notetaker. What they mind is finding out about it afterwards.
How we do it
The Meet seat is the notetaker on its own, for anyone who takes meetings, and it was built against the six-month test.
The bot joins Google Meet, Teams and Zoom, from your synced calendar or from a link. The transcript is attributed to speakers by name, and when a voice can't be identified it stays "Speaker 2" instead of getting a guessed name. You can correct it, and a correction is never overwritten.
After the meeting, the analysis gives you a short summary, the key topics with who raised them, the decisions and who made them, and the action items. Each action item has an owner and a real due date when one was said, and it carries the buyer's sentence word for word, in the language it was spoken, plus a short note on what the person needs to do without reopening the transcript. That's question 1, 2 and 3 answered by default. If the meeting was booked with a goal, you also get an internal check on whether it was met. That's question 5.
The analysis doesn't treat each meeting as the first one. Earlier calls, meetings and emails with the same company go into it. Before your next meeting with them, you get a brief: what happened since last time, which commitments are still open and who was in the room. That's question 6, and it's waiting in your inbox instead of somewhere you have to remember to look.
The action items become tasks, with the buyer's quote attached, and with Pipedrive or HubSpot connected they sync to your CRM under the person who owns them. The meeting itself stays on the company's timeline in Funnelfeedr, not in anyone's notebook. When you also want objections, competitor mentions and deal qualification pulled from those conversations, that's the Close seat.
What the notetaker won't write is the line from rule 5. That one is still yours.
Want to run the six-month test on your own meetings? Book a demo and bring the meeting you're most nervous about forgetting →