Business Communication Assignment 3

Summarizing and looking ahead of business meeting

There are good meetings and there are bad meetings. Bad meetings drone on forever, you never seem to get to the point, and you leave wondering why you were even present. Effective ones leave you energized and feeling that you've really accomplished something.

So what makes a meeting effective? This really boils down to three things :

1. They achieve the meeting's objective.
2. They take up a minimum amount of time.
3. They leave participants feeling that a sensible process has been followed.

If you structure your meeting planning, preparation, execution, and follow up around these three basic criteria, the result will be an effective meeting.

• Two Things to Do After Every Meeting.

Things after and in between meetings: Quickly send out clear and concise meeting notes and follow up on the commitments made.

1.      Meeting Notes.

As the Chinese proverb goes, “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” If you don’t capture the conversation and put into a form that can be easily retrieved later, the thinking and the agreements can be lost.

Meeting notes aren’t a necessary burden. They’re a powerful way to influence others. They help inform people who weren’t there about what happened and remind those who were there about what agreements they made. You can use them to keep everyone on the same page and focused on what you all need to get done before you meet next.

If you are working to reduce the number of people who attend your meetings, the notes take on more importance because people love to be included and informed. Sharing a summary of the meeting is an important part of working on engagement.

2.      Follow up on commitments.

Persistence is a key influence skill. If you want anything to happen, you must follow up, follow up, and follow up.

Some managers are concerned that close follow-up might be interpreted as micromanaging. They don’t want to be accused of not trusting people to perform. In reality, consistent follow-up is a necessary part of project leadership.

• Explain What is the Result of Benefit for Each Other.

Explain to your business partner, what is the benefit for you both. Make them believe that they get a big benefit. And also you too.

• Boost Your Business by Asking for Feedback.

This is another important component of asking that is often overlooked. How do you really know if your product or service is meeting the needs of your clients and customers?

Ask them!

Set up regular customer surveys that ask good questions, and include the tough questions. You could even consider a monthly focus group where you can meet your customers face-to-face. If you supervise a team of people or run a large organization, ask the people you work with for ideas.

No matter what type of industry you work in, you’re surrounded by people who can give you valuable feedback. All you need to do is ask.

• Boost Your Profits Asking for Next Business.

After doing a business and get some benefits of their product or service. Ask them for the next order/business. The key is : If you want business, you must always ask to your partner.

Don’t waffle, or talk around it, or even worse, wait for your prospect to ask you. The point is, just ask. Also, make sure your closing question is designed to produce a “Yes” or “No” answer, unlike your earlier questions in the discovery process, where all you really want is more information.

Remember that business grinds to a halt when you stop asking. When you consistently ask for more business, you rapidly gain momentum.

• Make a summary of your meeting as well as you can.

Often when we have meetings it is important to keep people who are not at the meeting informed about what happened at the meeting. The people who are not there don't really want to read all of the meeting notes so it is important to summarise for them. It is important to send out meeting notes immediately after the meeting. The same goes for the meeting summary. Leaving it a few days is often too long in today's fast moving business environment. The key to writing a good summary is having a clear meeting purpose and agenda It is very much easier to summarise a meeting that is well structured from the start. So you must pay attention to writing a good meeting purpose and then structuring the agenda to meet that purpose.

Write the summary as you go through the meeting to ensure common understanding. When you reach the end of the meeting write an overall summary that covers the purpose of the meeting. Again use the formula: what you did to meet the purpose, what was decided and what is going to happen as a result. Don't repeat the summaries of the agenda items. Then to create the summary all you have to do is collect the meeting purpose, agenda items with their summaries and the overall summary and send them out. Using the meeting agenda as an outline, write a summary of each discussion or presenter. Explain any conclusions surrounding action items from the last meeting. In one or two sentences, explain the basics of each speech. Use simple, straightforward language that makes no judgments or analysis.