While business meetings are a common routine in corporate life, too often they are either badly structured or poorly timed to create much positive impact. For example, many businesses have sales meetings but neglect to include their marketing staff, which should be an important part in the process of making sales.
Meetings are essential for the direction and growth of your business, and it is important to know what kind of meetings your business should be having, how regularly they should be held and how to make them as productive as possible.
The aim of a business meeting should be to establish goals and directions, foster relationships and communication, and share knowledge that will inspire your team to aim for their best potential. An important aspect to consider is how often to hold meetings.
Too few meetings and your team may lose focus and direction, but overly frequent meetings risks reduced productivity, discouraging your team and creating a cynical attitude.
Ideally, you should hold the following meetings:
1. One annual meeting to establish the overall strategies and goals for the business over the following year. This is where decisions affecting increased profits, ROIs, new projects and resources should be discussed and should involve those in management positions or key figures in their respective departments. Once established, these goals can be passed onto the team for practical discussions around implementation, feedback and reporting.
2. One monthly team meeting to determine how well your team is meeting these goals. Each key team member should have the opportunity to report on what they succeeded in for the month and what they plan to achieve in the next.
3. One mid-monthly meeting to determine if goals are on track to be met at the end of the month, and if anything needs to be done to attain these results.
4. Combined monthly ‘smarketing’ meetings should be held with your sales and marketing teams. Sales meetings will allow you to adjust the process of following up customers, supporting sales staff and keeping track of targets, while marketing meetings will make sure your team’s goals are aligned with the overall strategy towards achieving the business’s goals. Including both teams in meetings will get them working in unison and foster the sharing of information and strategies.
It is important to ensure that these meetings are minuted so that each team member knows what transpired and what issues need to be addressed in the next meeting. They should also be collaborative (i.e not dominated by senior managers), so that everyone can add their own input and in so doing feel part of the process.
One way to ensure efficiency in your business meetings is to employ the services of an inbound marketing agency, such as JDR. Marketing agencies hold regular meetings with clients to ensure that your goals are on track and can coach you on how to conduct more effective team meetings. In addition to marketing, our team specialise in business coaching that will help you and your business develop the optimum strategies to grow your business and generate sales.
Meetings are an integral part of growing your business but they need to be competently structured, well-timed, inclusive of all relevant parties from your own team and others, and ultimately have a clear goal in mind with strategies developed to reach it.
Using the services of an inbound marketing agency can help set you on the path to holding more effective business meetings to achieve business growth.
To find out more, please call 01332 343281.
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