Throughout my marketing career, I have participated in more meetings than I can remember. Those are precious minutes and hours I will never get back. Although some were very productive meetings, the majority were not. It seems it is not a matter of big company versus small company as I have witnessed dysfunctional meetings at companies of all sizes and with different ranks participating.
However, there were a few that stood out as effective meetings where the team felt that something had been accomplished. Some meetings had everyone excited about a certain topic while others were short but very useful. Some meeting organizers really knew how to get people to participate and others had a certain way of making everyone laugh.
It is based on this experience of observing what worked and what didn't, as well as running my own meetings, that I bring you a compilation of what I have seen that really works when it comes to conducting effective marketing meetings.
You don't have to read this book in sequence but if you are new to organizing marketing meetings, it will certainly help.
Chapter 1, Identifying the Meeting Type, covers the most common marketing meetings you will encounter. Not all marketing meetings are the same, and being able to think about the type of meeting you are organizing or that you are attending will help you get better prepared and make it more effective.
Chapter 2, Preparing for the Meeting, is all about how to plan and prepare for an upcoming marketing meeting. We explore some key steps in how to prepare for each type of marketing meeting including the creation of agendas, tools to use, and more.
Chapter 3, Making Your Meetings Fun, is my favorite chapter as we talk about tips and techniques to get attendee participation, different ways to open your meetings, suggestions of other places where you can have your meetings, and how to get people engaged and interested in the topic at hand.
Chapter 4, Effectively Conducting Your Meeting, is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, because it is all about execution. No amount of planning or preparation can save you from a poorly conducted meeting. Knowing how to properly conduct a meeting is an essential part of having an effective meeting and giving you an opportunity to shine. Here we cover different ways to open the meeting, as well as discussing the importance of an agenda, eliciting participation, closing the meeting, and different tools to help you during the meeting.
Chapter 5, An Effective Meeting Follow up, is often a neglected aspect of running meetings because it deals with what you should do after the meeting is over. Effective meetings require great follow up, so we talk here about writing meeting minutes, taking notes, some different software tools that you can use to help with action items, and how and when to follow up after the meeting.
Chapter 6, Putting Ideas into Practice, is where we wrap up the lessons by adding extra "sauce" to the effective meetings equation. This is where we talk about what makes effective meeting leaders, and we cover being proactive, inquisitive, resourceful, smart, and persistent. With these five concepts, you can take your knowledge about effective meetings and apply it to other areas of the business.
This book was written for the novice marketer or the recently-promoted marketing manager as a guide to help get the most out of the many meetings they will have to run for the department. Experienced marketing professionals or marketing consultants will also find some new ideas and techniques that they can apply immediately.
Even if they are not in the marketing field, some of the tips and best practices discussed can be transferred over to other functional areas.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold.
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