Better Website Meetings With A Strategy
Having been the senior executive at 4 companies over the last 10 years, I’ve been through my fair share of non-productive and confrontational meetings about everything from sales strategy to budget setting. By far, the most painful meetings have been the ones about choosing a website plan / design. I decides to do something about: to paraphrase that shaving company guy: “I hated it so much, I started a new company (to solve it)”.
It took real focus for me to realize that there was one simple explanation for why website-related management meetings were so much worse than other meetings. Here it is:
Your website is exactly the same as your other business functions. It needs a clear strategy which means: goals, ideas, decision frameworks and a process for meetings. Inevitably, we thought of our website as a brochure which we could figure out in a quick meeting on the fly. That assumption underestimates the potential, capabilities and effort required to manage your website.
Think about it. Your website will:
- Be seen by a majority of your prospects (even if they didn’t start there)
- Be open 24/7 while your offices are closed 66% of the time.
- Deliver critical content about your company’s history and strengths, products or services and the benefits brought to key market segments.
- Allow visitors to learn, understand, develop interest and choose to contact / buy from your company.
- Cost less but deliver more profit than any of your sales team.
Now how would you define being prepared for a meeting about website design or strategy?
It’s no wonder that most website related meetings go badly at first. Attendees come in with the feeling its a side project of the company or, at the least, not connected to the core business. Ideas are not generated ahead of time and a meeting plan is not developed prior to the meeting.
Putting all your strengths into your website
Through running web strategy meetings for clients, we’ve learned that an absence of structure, ideas and goals can create a highly dysfunctional web strategy meeting. Our approach brings ideas (from experience and industry research), a framework for discussing and deciding between different strategies and methodologies for translating decisions into website strategies.
How should a good website planning meeting go?
Team members should get a clear sense from the beginning of two things:
- What is expected from each one of them
- What the goals of the exercise are
These two aspects will create a greater focus in the meeting and more importantly avoid the wide degree of sidetracking that happens in an undefined management meeting. We’ve seen many meetings of both forms and our clients consistently say that they are amazed how much more focused meetings that we coordinate for them are. As stated earlier, its just about goals and expectations for participants. With that in hand, your team can contribute all their strengths into building a powerful web presence.
This website (webstrategycompany.com) is brought to you by AftertheNet (www.afterthenet.com), a different kind of website services company. We take an industry specific and research oriented approach to building expertise in web strategy. To learn the four levels (ideas, planning, execution and fine-tuning) at which we can help you to achieve your business goals using your online presence, please visit www.afterthenet.com.
