On a recent episode of The Sales Hunter Podcast, Mark was joined by Mark Mallchok, co-founder of Brella, to unpack the real ROI of sales meetings and where most companies get it wrong. With decades of experience orchestrating corporate events worldwide, Mark Mallchok didn’t hold back in identifying what actually drives high performance, and what holds teams back.
Meetings Have to Serve a Purpose
“The very first thing is stop. Ask yourself, why am I holding this meeting? What do I want to accomplish from this meeting?”
Too many sales meetings happen just to check a box, not to deliver results. Both Marks agreed that the number one driver of high performance is a clear purpose. High-performing teams start with outcome-based planning, not just agendas or logistics. Knowing the business goal is non-negotiable if you want any ROI.
Early, Purposeful Planning
The highest-performing sales teams and companies don’t leave event planning to the last minute or treat it as an afterthought. Mark Malchok has witnessed this mistake repeatedly:
“People wait too long to start. If we had started this more than a month in advance, we could have done xyz, blah, blah, blah.”
The best drive results by starting early, looping in their partners ahead of time, and ensuring everyone knows what outcomes they own.
Prioritizing Human Connections
Networking isn’t optional; it’s mission-critical if you want high performance. Too many companies fall into the trap of over-stuffed agendas, leaving little time for the team to connect, share insights, and create lasting bonds.
“If your goal is to make connections and build relationships and have human-to-human contact, you can’t just have this fire hose of information where they’re going to be burned out after the first couple of hours.”
The best meetings intentionally carve out space for people to meet, talk, and build trust. That’s what creates real engagement and memories that stick.
Experience, Not Just Information
Events that matter tap into something deeper than just product details or forecast reviews. Mark Mallchok nailed it: “All of your content is going to be tied to something—sometimes it’s audio, sometimes smell, sometimes experiences.”
The best meetings and teams amplify performance by blending visual, emotional, and transformational elements. That means building agendas with energy flows, interactive moments, and unexpected experiences, not just a parade of PowerPoints.
Consequences and Accountability
High performers make sure meetings have weight. There’s accountability because if you miss out, you risk falling behind. Sales meetings must deliver insights or connections that reps can’t get anywhere else.
“There needs to be information that is presented at that meeting that if they miss that meeting, they’re going to fail in some way, shape or form. It has to have value to their day-to-day.”
When meetings are seen as consequential rather than just routine, people show up ready to engage.
The Three Barriers Holding Teams Back
Last-Minute Mindset
Waiting until the last minute to book speakers, assemble materials, or set the agenda guarantees mediocrity. Mark Mallchok points out that top-tier speakers and partners book up months in advance. Last-minute scramble means you’re left settling.
Product-Driven, Not People-Driven
Meetings that focus only on products, numbers, or logistics bore the team and sap morale. “If your content can be covered in some other way, don’t waste the time there in person doing it.”
The real value of getting people together is in the experiences and connections—not the content dump.
Lack of Clear Metrics
Most teams don’t define what success looks like before the meeting. Surveys and KPI-driven feedback are rarely planned in advance, making it nearly impossible to prove or even understand the real impact.
“Write your survey before you even start planning your meeting… You need to define what are the things that you want to measure first, then build your agenda to match those goals, and then measure those goals.”
Raising the Bar
Driving high performance in sales comes down to defining clear goals, planning early, and prioritizing people over process. Successful teams design meetings as transformational experiences. Leaders break the cycle of last-minute, product-centric planning and instead focus on the connections, energy, and accountability needed to move the needle.
The best meetings aren’t just a box to check. They’re a catalyst for growth, connection, and action. High performance happens when every element of your event is optimized for impact, not just attendance.
Mark Hunter :
Why do you have a sales meeting? Is your sales meeting delivering the roi? Oh, come on now, let’s not kid ourselves. Too many times sales meetings are held just to check a box. Let’s get the ROI on the sales meeting. That’s what we’re going to unpack today. With me today is Mark Malchuk. Don’t confuse me with this Mark, but he is the co founder of Brella. Why am I talking? Let’s get the show going. Right now you’re listening to the Sales Hunter podcast with Mark Hunter where the
Mark Mallchok :
focus is to you as a sales manager, sell with confidence and integrity.
Mark Hunter :
And now here’s your host, 2 marks
Mark Mallchok :
in the studio today.
Mark Hunter :
Mark Melchock, co founder of Brella. Welcome.
Mark Mallchok :
Thanks so much, Mark. So glad to be here. I’m very excited about our conversation.
Mark Hunter :
Hey, you have such a great front row seat, back row seat everything to so many training sessions, company meetings, events and so forth. Because that’s what your company does. You really help maximize the roi. And that’s what we’re talking about here today. Let’s unpack it. What are a couple of the big issues that you see companies blowing when it comes to making a sales meeting, making any meeting effective?
Mark Mallchok :
Yeah, I mean, as you said, I’ve been backstage to like thousands of meetings over the last 35 years. Right. And I have seen it all. So I agree with you. There are a lot of things. One of the big things that people don’t do right now that I think is just biting them in the butt and is asking that hard question right away about why are we doing this meeting in the first place? What’s our point of having this meeting? Right. So if you don’t think about what are my goals, what are my business goals for this meeting and bringing all of these people together, you’re doomed to never hit them. If you don’t have KPIs, if you don’t have metrics, and more importantly, if you don’t think about what the audience is going to get out of it, then you can’t deliver, you can’t plan your agenda to make it work.
Mark Mallchok :
So it’s, it’s, that’s probably the very first thing is stop. Ask yourself, why am I holding this meeting? What do I want to accomplish from this meeting? What do I want my attendees to think at the end of it, to feel during it, to do afterwards? What is that belonging or community you’re trying to create with them? Then you can start the planning process. So that’s, that’s probably number one Number two, I think, is that people wait too long to start. Right. I was on a call this morning. First thing was a debrief for a meeting that we did. And, you know, the conversation centered around, well, if we had started this more than a month in advance, we could have done xyz, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Right. All of these things.
Mark Mallchok :
So, you know, that’s. The other thing is make sure you spend plenty of time thinking about your goals, but start it early and then bring in those partners that are going to help you to make it successful where they still have plenty of Runway to do something. They’re not painted into a corner, they’re not, you know, stuck.
Mark Hunter :
Oh, wow. You just, you called out the elephant in the room because so many. It’s amazing. I do a lot of speaking. I speak of probably 100 events a year, and I will get calls just three, four weeks out. Hey, can you keynote our sales kickoff meeting? Can you keynote this event in. And I’m like, wait a minute, why didn’t you call me six, eight months ago? But I want to come back to something because what you just described really frames us up. It’s.
Mark Hunter :
This is really no different than a sales call. If you’re going to go in on a sales call, you have a very clear call to action that, that you want to have happen at the end of the sales call. But we invest hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, millions in sales meeting, millions of dollars in sales meetings, and then we stumble and fall with no clear call to action. Why, how, how do we get out of that?
Mark Mallchok :
Yeah. And, and it was interesting because on the call this morning, they were apologizing about not getting their materials ready like a day before. Right. So usually this is a corporate culture issue. This is a culture that comes from the top where people are allowed to do things last minute. And I understand why. Don’t get me wrong. Like, I understand people are incredibly busy and they’re just looking for the next thing they have to check off their list.
Mark Mallchok :
So part of this comes from not dedicating the resources to planning some of your meetings that you need. So if you’re relying on people to do this in their after hours when they’re done with their day job. Right. It’s going to fail because they don’t have time to think proactively about what are our goals and how do we achieve them, and what should the agenda really be? Not just logistics, but like real human, human connection with the audience. So I think it’s. It’s a failure from the Standpoint of valuing the event, valuing the team that puts on that event and giving them the resources and time to do it. Because just like you said, like, it’s incredibly hard to find an incredible speaker a month out. It’s just as hard to find incredible partners from your creative agencies, your content agencies, your AV providers a month out.
Mark Mallchok :
Those people who are really good across any industry are booked a year in advance. Yeah.
Mark Hunter :
So then they wind up going, well, we’re just going to do it in house. We’re just going to do it in house. Yeah. You know what’s funny is I don’t think companies realize the cost is. Oh wow. The cost of an AV company. The cost, hey, the cost of taking your people off the street, the cost of pulling your people into a hotel room, the car. That is the much bigger cost.
Mark Mallchok :
Yeah, yeah. Itself. Agreed. Like it is probably equal to, you know, all of the rest of the costs. Right. If you look at things like airlift or like the cost of flights to get people, a lot of our, our clients are, are larger corporations and they hold the meetings in Europe.
Mark Hunter :
Right.
Mark Mallchok :
So they’re flying people from all over the world. Airlift on some of these shows are in the multi millions of dollars.
Mark Hunter :
Right.
Mark Mallchok :
Especially because a lot of people will fly Polaris. Very first class. I get it. Right. They’re long flights. But those are like I was pricing stuff. They’re like $10,000 right now, $15,000 a seat. Right.
Mark Mallchok :
So that has a cost minor to that is F and B, like the food and beverage, the sleeping rooms. Production is actually a very small part of the grand scheme of things. But to your point, taking a sales rep off of the phone, off the floor, off of email, out of their day for three or four days plus days of travel. So a week off, not working massively so expensive. So you need to really make sure that what you do when you have them there is the most effective use of their time. That is maximizing the time that they’re there but also looking at on your agenda what are the things that are important that may not be tied to content. One of the things I constantly think about for meetings is that you have to show that meeting has importance and importance comes from the top. Right.
Mark Mallchok :
That’s your senior leaders doing something there that shows that they value it being there. So that passes along and that comes from production as well. If you don’t show that it looks like this meeting’s important, people aren’t going to think that it’s going to be important for them. They’ll disengage. The other thing though is that you have to have consequences.
Mark Hunter :
Right.
Mark Mallchok :
There needs to be information that is presented at that meeting that if they miss that meeting, they’re going to fail in some way, shape or form. It has to have value to their day to day to make something that is going to elevate their work, to make them more effective in their job, to make more money, to make up for that week of missed pay.
Mark Hunter :
Right.
Mark Mallchok :
So there’s a lot of instances around here. But yeah, it’s very expensive to hold these meetings. You have to make sure that you’re getting your ROI out of it, that you’re getting a value for it.
Mark Hunter :
Yeah, that’s what I mean. I, I always cringe when they say, well, we don’t quite have enough, you know, for your fee, for your full fee to speak, and yet they’re spending hundreds and millions of dollars on piece. I, I’ve got three words. People always say, Mark, you do a lot of keynote speaking and so forth. And I say there’s three things I’m trying to do. I’m trying to create a visually emotional transformation. In other words, you know, the meaning has got to be visual because again, we are a visual society. It’s got to be emotional, it’s got to capture me, whether that be through the networking, through the event, through the venue, whatever it is.
Mark Hunter :
But then there has to be transformation because if people don’t do something different, it was a waste. But that’s hard to measure.
Mark Mallchok :
Do you have. Incredibly hard to measure and even harder to plan. Right. That’s the thing that everybody forgets about is like, what do I want my audience to become through this meeting? Right. And that comes back to those months and months of time thinking those hard thoughts and making those hard decisions about what stays in the content and what doesn’t. And it’s interesting because I had a meeting recently where I asked them, you know, what’s the most important thing? And it was connections, it was networking, it was trying to make sure that people who are around the world who get together have an opportunity to connect. And then I looked at the agenda and it was jam packed full of passive meetings where they were just talking at them and I was like, we’ve got to change this. Like if your goal is to make connections and build relationships and have human to human contact, you can’t just have this fire hose of information where they’re going to be burned out after the first, you know, couple of hours.
Mark Mallchok :
So it takes some hard thinking. It takes a Lot of guts from the senior leaders to say, well, we’re not going to do this the same way. We’re not going to just focus on logistics. What we’re going to focus on is what are our goals, what are we trying to accomplish. Let’s start there and then build out from there. And it may mean that the meeting is shorter. Right. And maybe some of the material content isn’t presented together because that’s not important.
Mark Mallchok :
Maybe it’s pre work, maybe it’s post work. Maybe there’s a virtual meeting that happens afterwards where they share that information because it’s not relevant or when you’re together in person.
Mark Hunter :
Thank you for saying that because I watched so many meetings come together and they start off while we’re going to have a 30 minute break in the morning.
Mark Mallchok :
30.
Mark Hunter :
And then, and then, well, we’re going to cut it to 20. Well, we’re going to cut it 15, we got to cut it to 10 because some marketing person wants to roll out some new widget, some new something or other. And as a result then the organization which really only maybe gets together once a year at the most and many times they haven’t been together for several years. It’s an event I’m at this next week where he said 40% of the audience has never met each other. Right. We have to allow time and that’s Val. But CEOs don’t see the value in that. Networking.
Mark Mallchok :
That is exactly it. Well, and that’s the problem because that’s actually the most important thing. Like if your team isn’t connected, if your team isn’t like firing on cylinders together because they met, they have each other’s back through some sort of team building activity or experience they’ve done. Right. That’s a huge failure. That’s why we have in person meetings, is to connect in person meetings aren’t. I’m sitting in an audience in a ballroom, you know, an in person meeting. The worst in person meeting that I can think of is I leave my home in a taxi, I get to the airport, I get onto a plane, I get to an airport, I get in a taxi, I go to my room, I fall asleep, I wake up the next morning, I’m in a room in a ballroom, I then I go to sleep.
Mark Mallchok :
Ballroom, sleep, ballroom, sleep, taxi, airport, home. They’ve never experienced anything about the city they’re in with the people they are there to develop these memories with. And that’s the key. This all comes back to retention. All of your content is going to be Tied to something. You said visual, right? So sometimes it’s audio, sometimes smell, sometimes it’s experiences. Right. The people that are in that audience are not going to remember the ballroom, they’re not going to remember the food, they’re not going to remember even some of your content unless it is tied to some memory that brings it back to them at some point in the future.
Mark Mallchok :
Then they suddenly remember. So if you ask somebody what’s their favorite event, they’re going to name a city, they’re going to name an activity, they’re going to name a person they met, they’re not going to name like the sales forecast numbers at LBE for 2026. Right. That’s not it. It’s a connection.
Mark Hunter :
But, but there’s so many CEOs and senior level. Oh, we got to make sure we go through the forecast, we got to make sure we roll out this, we go to. And it becomes a product focused, task driven meeting and people are sitting there saying, oh, shoot me.
Mark Mallchok :
Right? This could have been an email.
Mark Hunter :
Yes, right.
Mark Mallchok :
And if you, if you look at, you know, your, your. Because we, we do a lot of design as well. We like, you know, consult on, you know, the look and feel, but also the content that’s in there. And we work with a lot of amazing companies that focus on this. If your content can be covered in some other way, don’t waste the time there in person doing it. Look for opportunities to break out of that and then distribute that information in a different way. And that is so incredibly hard to measure. Right.
Mark Mallchok :
Because there’s this, this iron curtain between, you know, sales numbers and training. Right. Between those two groups, no information passes. It’s horrible, right, because the sales team, you know, wants to improve like the amount of sales, how much money they’re bringing in, like all of these other goals that they have. Training has similar goals, but they never know when they put on these meetings, whether it’s events or training, they never know how well they did because it’s impossible to track that to something like, you know, a sales quota, right. Or, you know, did they hit their mark on what they’re trying to do for this year? So finding that way to pass information about, of how do you, you know, set something up as a mark for success, as a metric for success, as a KPI for success is incredibly difficult. But when you do it, that’s when the CEOs and the senior leaders suddenly can go into it and go, oh my gosh, I didn’t realize that this actually resulted in this increase in sales. Now suddenly they’re invested in having more meetings and actually providing more information.
Mark Hunter :
Yeah. So how do we measure the ROI of a meeting? Do you have strategies?
Mark Mallchok :
Yeah, it’s. It is so hard. There are so many people who are struggling with that right now because it’s not just roi, but it’s roe. And ROE has like three different terms. Like, it’s return on experience, it’s return on events. Right. There’s so many different things that are about that. So I think it comes down to.
Mark Mallchok :
Back to the original question. What is it that you want to get out of this meeting? Write your survey before you even start planning your meeting. Like, if you look at your survey and say, what did we want to accomplish? If your goal is to provide better community, great. You can work on that. If your goal is to provide information that allows that salesperson to be better in connecting with their client, great. You have something to work from. So you need to define what are the things that you want to measure first, then build your agenda to match those goals and then measure those goals. And nobody does that.
Mark Mallchok :
Very few people think about what they’re trying to achieve before, and they always come at it afterwards. And usually the surveys are ignored and people so plan it ahead of time. Do the survey, give them something of value to give you valuable feedback. Right. Gluttony is good. Right. You know, if you can find something that says, hey, if you’re going to do this survey for me, we’re going to give you X, Y or Z something of value. Sometimes that’s food, sometimes that’s gifts.
Mark Mallchok :
Sometimes that’s, you know, gift cards, whatever. Sometimes it is extra information nobody else gets. Right? Right. It could be envy. Right. It could be something that. It is a valuable commodity as a reward for them doing this. I actually had a client who forced the team to fill out their surveys before they were allowed to leave at the end of the session, right before they could go to the party.
Mark Mallchok :
And I was like, okay, pushing it a little bit. But I love the idea. I love the hood spot. I love this concept of, you know what? This is important for us to be able to help you. So therefore. So I think those are good. Obviously, tie it to things you can measure in metrics, but also to the human component and get the feedback from the people that were in the audience.
Mark Hunter :
I’m amazed as I speak at so many corporate events around the world every year, I’ll ask the question, what are your goals? What are your objectives? And I get this blank stare and as well, this Is, this is our, this is our annual meeting. We’ve done it every year.
Mark Mallchok :
Yep.
Mark Hunter :
Man, stick a needle in my eye.
Mark Mallchok :
I mean, I know it’s, it’s so frustrating. Well, and it’s hard for you too because you know, when I hire a speaker, the very first thing they always ask is like, who am I talking to? What do they want to know? How can I connect with them and pass information along? Right. So your job is just as much as mine, which is, you know, how do we discover what I’m going to do to speak at from the stage to help them out. I need some way to connect with them. So it’s very interesting.
Mark Hunter :
It is such a fascinating because again, the spend, the amount of money being spent and the time is absolutely huge. And yet I look at, you know, people are company’s most valuable resource. It’s not what they make, it’s not. And yet we undervalue, we under, we just don’t do it. So what, what would be if, if, if, if companies, you know, somebody’s listening this, watching this right now, what would you say or that, what steps should they be going through right now to plan for their next meeting?
Mark Mallchok :
Yep, yep. So very easy things. One, Ask yourself those pre planning questions and goals. Start your planning early. Bring in your partners early into the process. They’re the professionals that can help you out. And then focus on your agenda early. Not as a, you know, logistical thing, but actually as a roadmap to connections and energy flow for the meeting.
Mark Mallchok :
Right. So look at, what are your opportunities to do the human, human. Look at those breaks that you mentioned. Right. You know, I would, I would even say, you know, you had listed some perfect breaks, which I’m very happy with. Right. I would say 30 minute break for conversations, hour and a half for lunch. Find something else to do in that lunch to make it exciting.
Mark Mallchok :
We do one meeting where we have a bunch of partners that come in and we use all of those 30 minute breaks and lunch breaks as an opportunity for them to go and talk to these other partners that have come in specifically to talk to them. We make games out of it, we do passports, they get gifts, all sorts of things. But it also breaks up your agenda a little bit and then find other opportunities to engage with your audience. Think these through in advance. So I mentioned, you know, there are opportunities you need to break things up a little bit. So there’s that 10 minute window that you need to break up all of your things with a video or another speaker or an activity, a poll, something that Provides some energy back and forth. So those types of things. Because remember, people have 47 second attention spans, right.
Mark Mallchok :
And they have 10 minute roughly, you know, focus times. Be constantly looking at your agenda of how I can engage with people, how can I break things up. Do 45 minute sessions, not hour long sessions, do different things to connect with people, do workshops, do things where you get people to be active participants in communicating around a table. So look at all of those things as opportunities as you’re starting to plan. Don’t just say on the, have a presenter from the state, look for ways to break your meeting up, change it completely from what you’ve done before and look at new things. The other thing, get great speakers in there that break things up. This isn’t just a pitch for you, but like I love to bring in a keynote speaker that’s talking about something that is not just the content because it refreshes, it makes it an amazing opportunity. So you want to engage your attendees, you want to make this an incredible experience, you want to tie one all of that content to memorable moments.
Mark Mallchok :
That’s what will make your meeting a
Mark Hunter :
success and understand where it sits in the day. I mean, I’m amazed how so many times coming back after lunch they have the most boring speaker in, in the world on stage or something like that
Mark Mallchok :
and cramming too much into your day. Right. You know, I had one where you know, the, the people were traveling for like three or four hours to get there. They started off and did, granted we started at lunch, right. But like they did an afternoon meeting, then we did all these afternoons, then they did an award show in the evening. Like these poor people were up at like 3:00am and didn’t go to bed until like 11:00 clock at night. No wonder the next day they’re exhausted, right. And don’t have any energy to do absolutely anything.
Mark Hunter :
Oh, that’s so true. I mean the, I mean the meeting we’re going to have in Barcelona, 50% of the audience is coming from the U.S. but we’re going to start at 8 o’ clock in the morning. No, wrong, that’s like 2am for them. So not going to work or the same thing or you know, just gonna
Mark Mallchok :
say like, and it’s Barcelona. Like Nobody meets at 80 bucks more than like, I’m lucky if I can start a meeting in Spain at 10 o’. Clock.
Mark Hunter :
At 10 o’. Clock, I’m lucky. I’m lucky, right? Exactly, exactly. That’s whole thing. I mean you got, you got to get out of your Corporate mindset, it’s the same thing. It’s the same thing with Vegas. I mean, let me tell you something. I mean, you got people from the east coast and oh, by the way, when are their flights leaving? Because if you want to get home that night, you’re leaving at one o’, clock, you’re leaving for the airport at noon.
Mark Hunter :
So, you know. Yeah, it just, again, people don’t take this in. Okay, we got a wrap. We could talk for hours.
Mark Mallchok :
So much.
Mark Hunter :
Tell the audience a little bit about Barella, how people can get in touch with you.
Mark Mallchok :
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, definitely reach out to me. As you can tell, I love talking about this stuff. It is a passion of mine. We’ve been doing it for decades. Our goal is to optimize meetings and events for corporate clients. We do all, it’s just business to business, corporate communications. And what we try to do is we try to make projects and events more efficient.
Mark Mallchok :
Efficiency leads to economic savings. Right. So they become more cost effective. And my goal obviously is to engage audience all the time. So we’re always looking to be is, you know, efficient, economical and most importantly engaging. And we do that by sitting down with our clients and just planning all this out. So reach out to me. You can reach me through LinkedIn, socials, et cetera.
Mark Mallchok :
Go to brella.com so brella.com will have lists of like how do you reach me? And all this. And I’ll offer this also out to the audience, like email me. I, I will be happy to like reply back and talk about things. It’s very simple. Mark brawler.com I love that.
Mark Hunter :
Mark, thank you for being with us. See two Marks in the studio and we had a great conversation. You’ve been listening to the Sales Hunter podcast. My name’s Mark Hunter. The other Mark. Why do we do the show? It’s to help you see and achieve what you didn’t think was possible. Today we did a deep dive with a subject matter expert. That’s one episode every week and then we do another episode where it’s just me, solo topic.
Mark Hunter :
Hey, do me a favor, subscribe, rate and review the show on your favorite podcast app, would you? Make sure you reach out brella.com I tell you what, Mark, absolutely fantastic conversation. Thank you for being on the show and everybody, great selling.
