Meetings suck. It’s time for people to stop doing actual work and instead stare blankly at each other while making generic comments. If you’re lucky, you might get some wicked notebook doodles out of it.
Is that how people perceive your marketing meetings? I hope that things don’t have to be that way.
Compelling content is key to making your marketing meetings more useful. I’m surprised that inbound marketing concepts work in real life, too!
As your team grows, it’s important for everyone to get in a room together and share what they’ve been working on in their corner of the world. This helps everyone stay on the same page and avoid duplication of effort. To make marketing team meetings useful for your employees, keep the following tips in mind.
How to Run an Effective Meeting
This post will talk about how to make meetings more effective, with a focus on marketing meetings. However, the tips in this post can be applied to any kind of meeting.
I’ve already said that meetings can be a huge waste of time. It’s easy to avoid doing the hard work by asking others for their opinion or by scheduling meetings.
I’m here to tell you — don’t do it. The key to having successful meetings is to make sure that they are only scheduled when they are actually needed.
The company holds quarterly meetings to report on progress and share important news. Of course. Meetings every month to track progress on key metrics and to find additional resources for upcoming projects? Sounds great. Weekly meetings to report on current responsibilities and asks? I’m not sure if this is necessary, but it could be a good idea for teams with a lot of members or teams with new employees.
Time spent in meetings is time that could be spent working on tasks that will help move the business forward. Having regular meetings with your team is a good way to stay in touch and stay on the same page. Of course.
After the meeting, ask your team members how they thought it went. This will help you to understand how effective and efficient the meeting was. Ask, “is [meeting] helpful for you? This can help you understand what percentage of your team members feel that the meetings are beneficial to them and what aspects of the meetings could be cut out to save time.
What should your marketing meeting agendas look like?
Marketing Meeting Agenda
Whether your marketing team meeting is weekly or monthly, you should always go over the same topics. This section will explain what those topics are. We recommend projecting a slide deck in each meeting so that everyone can follow along with each agenda item.
Marketing Meeting Agenda Example
For every meeting, you should have a dedicated agenda slide that lays out three things:
- What will be discussed in today’s meeting
- Who will be leading each discussion
- How much time is allotted for each discussion
If you want to keep the meeting on track, you should outline who is going to be talking, what topics they will be covering, and how much time they have to discuss it. The revision will also help people to avoid getting into unproductive conversations that would be better had at another time and place.
What should be discussed during the marketing meeting?
Review Important Metrics
It is important to keep track of your marketing metrics in order to ensure the success of your marketing campaigns. A quick review of your most important marketing metrics can help you identify any areas that need improvement. Metrics related to email unsubscribe rate, social media reach, or blog subscriber growth should not be niche metrics. These metrics should be reviewed during monthly meetings in order to track month-over-month progress.
The following metrics should be used to measure your marketing team’s performance. What metrics will tell you whether the marketing team succeeded at the end of the month?
While every business will likely review something different depending on its business model, here are some ideas for you:
- Leads waterfall
- Sales waterfall
- The volume of marketing qualified leads(MQLs)
- Paid vs. organic leads breakdown
- Website Traffic
An important part of a marketing team’s job is to keep track of and analyze the team’s key metrics. This data is used to gauge the team’s effectiveness and success. If team members are not aware of how they are doing as the month progresses, individual contributors can not do anything to help improve the team’s numbers.
A Bit of Education
At marketing meetings, there should be a mix of content that covers the current state of the organization and content that is educational in nature. Each week, a couple of team members should give a brief presentation about any interesting projects they have been working on. The purpose of this is twofold: it keeps people in the loop about what their team members are up to all day, and they get to learn something new in the process!
It would be interesting for a blogger to learn about a PPC experiment. Would it be beneficial for a social media intern to learn about the results of the latest email A/B test?
Sharing information about what went well and what didn’t on past projects can help everyone learn more, avoid repeating mistakes, and try out new methods that might be effective.
At your weekly meeting, everyone will become smarter and better marketers!
The Nitty Gritty Retrospective
At your meeting, you should go over the projects that each employee (or team, if you have a large marketing department) worked on last month/quarter/year, as well as the results they’ve seen.
This is good for a few reasons. Each person in the meeting needs to explain what they do all day to hold them accountable. Second, by working together, everyone can learn from each other and become better marketers. This third point explains how the system benefits everyone by allowing them to see how well each team is doing and what improvements they are working on.
This is an opportunity for the social media team to report on the success of each social network they manage. How is their reach faring? What proportion of traffic to your site comes from those networks? How many leads are being generated? Why are some networks more successful than others?
Much like a weekly meeting, a monthly or quarterly meeting should focus on high-level, team-based metrics. This meeting is also a good opportunity to go more in depth with the channels and metrics that help the team achieve its goals.
Planning and Preparing Effective Sales Meeting Agendas
Before you plan your meeting, consider whether or not you actually need one.
You shouldn’t hold a meeting if the issue can be resolved in less than 10 minutes. Reach out to team members on Slack or Zoom for a one-on-one chat rather than holding an all-hands meeting.
Mark Hunter of The Sales Hunter shines a light on one particular motivator behind unnecessary sales meetings:
” Instead of being productive, many weekly sales meetings are simply a way for a sales manager to check an item off of their to-do list. I would bet a lot of money that this meeting is not helpful to the people in it if this is what is motivating it.
If you’re not careful, you might end up wasting everyone’s time and losing the respect of your reps. Avoid these types of meetings as much as possible.
Assuming you have completed this check, you can proceed and begin preparing for your sales meeting.
The lessons in this guide are applicable to both weekly meetings and one-off sessions. We’ll share ideas for the latter at the end.
Four Elements of a Successful Sales Meeting
$399 billion in 2019 The Doodle State of Meetings report found that ineffective meetings cost businesses in the U.S. $399 billion in 2019. $399 million. For an effective meeting, the three most important things are setting clear objectives, setting a clear agenda, and not having too many people in the room.
Although it is not certain, research suggests that the number of meetings has increased since the pandemic started. In the year 2020, the National Bureau of Research found that the number of meetings held by remote teams had increased by 13%. The average length of remote meetings decreased by 20% compared to face-to-face meetings, but remote workers are reporting that the length of the average workday has increased by 48.5 minutes.
What does all of this data mean? The increase in meetings is due to the shift to remote work. Meetings are shorter, but they occur more frequently. This is leading to increased reports of burnout.
The solution? Meetings should only be held if they are absolutely necessary and will be beneficial.
When putting together meaningful meetings, follow these principles:
- Use standardized agendas. Don’t reinvent the wheel for every meeting. Create “recurring” agendas and use these as templates. Team meeting agenda templates help your team know what to expect. Not only does this reduce the amount of time wasted trying to figure out agenda items, but it also means that the meeting attendees are better prepared with status updates, the last meeting’s notes, docs, and other pertinent information.
- Provide value. Every meeting should give your team value. In other words, provide them with something they can use to close more deals. This can be something as basic as training or even feedback from customers.
- Team participation. Reps will get bored if you don’t get them involved. Generate “buy-in” by setting expectations before the meeting. Encourage interaction throughout the meeting with Q&As and brainstorming sessions.
- Be consistent. Speaking of expectations, make sure recurring meetings are always held on the same day of the month or week, and at the time of the day. This will build a rhythm that sets expectations for your team members.
It can be tough to come up with ways to keep your team motivated all the time, which is why it’s helpful to have a consistent agenda. Having a set schedule of events and activities can make it easier to keep your team excited and engaged.
Items for Your Sales Meeting Agenda
What should you include in your team meeting agenda?
The most successful meetings center around data, feedback, and tangible next steps.
Here are some meeting topics that should be on your sales meeting agenda:
- Celebrate the big wins. Start on a positive note. Kick your meetings off on a high note to set the tone for the rest of the session. Insights, progress on sales targets and new strategic accounts are all calls for a celebration. Having a well-organized CRM will help you collect the data behind these wins.
- Updates on the pipeline. Get a quick status check from each team member. This keeps them accountable while shining a light on where you need to contribute – on both an individual and team-wide basis.
- Uncover obstacles. Are there any bottlenecks holding your team up from making progress? These can often come in the form of travel plans or even roadblocks from other departments. A good staff meeting agenda template should have the team’s needs front and center.
- Share prospect insights. Allow your reps to share the feedback they receive from prospects. What are they saying about your value proposition, company, and sales pitches?
- Dive into the metrics. Focus on monthly targets, as well as the metrics that lead to closed deals. Focus on collective numbers and save any feedback for one-to-one discussions. Nobody likes being called out in front of their peers.
- Share organizational information. As a sales leader, you’ll have unique insights into what’s happening elsewhere in the business. Share noteworthy insights with your reps, especially anything related to product updates and marketing team activities.
- Pick apart the competition. This is an opportunity for your reps to share anything they’ve learned about your competition, including why prospects chose them over you. Share as many insights as you can to get a bigger picture of the competitive landscape.
Include any other topics that are relevant to your industry or organization. Remember, standardization helps create consistency.
Although you may be hesitant to try something new, it may be beneficial to experiment with different formats for your meetings.
This includes things like role-play and micro-training sessions. This means anything that helps your team members improve their skills, further their careers, or benefits your organization as a whole.
You’ll need to create a document with your agenda and send it to your teams before the meeting. You can create your own design from scratch, or use a pre-made design template from a website like Template.net.
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