By Jennie Wong
The Charlotte Observer.
Meetings get a bad rep. People dread going to them, and often complain about them afterward, even when they’re leading them.
As a business owner, meetings are a fact of life. You are the face of your company, and when a prospect, customer or vendor wants to meet, they want to meet with you.
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So how can you take your meeting game to the next level? It’s as simple as A, B, C.
A IS FOR ACTION
The first step to a successful meeting is to determine what you want the result to be. Ask yourself, “If this meeting goes really well, what will happen next?”
Push yourself to define at least one specific action that will demonstrate success. If you’re meeting with a prospect, sharpen your goal from “Find out more about their project,” to “Gather the information I need to make a bid.” If you’re meeting with a customer, go beyond, “Find out if they’re happy with the service they’ve been getting,” to “Address any points of feedback about our service and get two referrals to new customers.”
Meeting leaders often make the mistake of thinking A stands for agenda. I’m a big believer in agendas, but if you start with an agenda, you often get a laundry list of topics. Agenda-driven meetings usually touch on a lot of issues, but don’t build to a goal.
B IS FOR BEFORE
Here’s a secret: The real meeting takes place before the meeting.
The “meeting before the meeting,” is where parameters are set, alliances are made and deals are struck. If you’ve ever attended a meeting where you were expecting to discuss something and got railroaded instead, you probably missed the real meeting.
As a professional facilitator, I like my positive outcomes to be a foregone conclusion. Which is not to say that the meeting itself is a rubber stamp, but rather that I’ve scouted the landscape. What is a realistic budget for the project?
Who are the likely partners for the work? What should I not even bother bringing up? These pieces of advance intelligence allow me to focus everyone’s precious time on the topics that will do the most good.
C IS FOR CONTINUITY
The worst meetings that I endured in corporate America felt like the movie “Groundhog Day.” The same questions, the same roadblocks, the same people sitting around the same table.
In contrast, the best meetings are the ones that feel like links in a chain, where the previous meeting’s issues have been resolved, placing a fresh set of challenges in front of the group.
If you can start a meeting by recapping tangible progress, you’ll greatly increase people’s excitement about what will happen next
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jennie Wong is an executive coach, author of the e-book “Ask the Mompreneur” and the creator of the product quiz website www.ABorC.com.
