Top 5 Traits for the Worst Marketing Meetings
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010Marketing meetings have become more frequent now due to work slow down. Senior management at professional firms are spending more time meeting with each other to discuss clients, prospects and pursuits in an effort to capture the limited project opportunities in the marketplace. At many firms, marketing meetings have become as frequent as weekly. Participants at most marketing meetings include senior practice leaders and managers. What most firms don’t realize is that these meetings come with a significant cost to their firms and oftentimes don’t provide a return on their investment.
Marketing meetings are expensive! Typical marketing meetings include 5 to 15 participants. If they meet every other week for one hour, the total number of hours spent in marketing meetings per year is 130 to 390 hours. As an example, at an average billing rate of $300 per hour, the cost is $39,000 to $117,000 per year. Assuming gross margin of 12%, these meeting must generate roughly $325,000 to $975,000 to break even. Larger firms with several group marketing meetings could be looking at a cost of several million dollars. Depending on the firm and project size, these fees are a tall order in this economy.
After years of working with consulting firms, I’ve seen all kinds of marketing meetings. I thought I would share with you the Top Five Traits for the Worst Marketing Meetings with some tips on how to improve them.
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Have participants report only leads and activity. Lengthy information reporting becomes boring to most participants. Don’t make the marketing meeting only a reporting session. Adhere to succinct reporting of only relevant information. Gather and distribute relevant data in advance of the meeting.
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Minimize idea exchange among participants. Two way reporting conversations between each participant and the meeting leader squelches peer dialog and team problem solving. Facilitate group problem solving and brainstorming for client development initiatives and challenges.
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Meet regularly without specific objectives. Having regular meetings may feel like there is a focus on getting more work, but to make things happen you must establish action-oriented objectives for each meeting.
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Assume that your people are helping each other. It’s a nice thought, but in reality, many individuals in different practice areas need specific action requests and follow up to cross sell. Relationships are made one person at a time and that includes with colleagues within the same company. Bringing people together with specific goals and action steps help facilitate development of stronger relationships among themselves and with their clients.
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Invite everyone to marketing meeting to hear what’s going on. Evaluate the number of regular meeting participants. All participants should have specific action items to accomplish. If they are not a player don’t take them offline for every meeting, invite them to only periodic meetings and learning sessions.
Hopefully this doesn’t sound too familiar. If it does, planning more effective marketing meetings is an easy fix which takes a bit of extra planning, but with focus can yield significantly more results and more regular attendance!
