More Ideas = Better Meetings (On Marketing or Website Plans)

Fuel your business meetings with a full set of ideas for each decision — options are key to better decision making in management meetings regardless of  subject.

Lets look at a specific scenario
You’ve decided to incorporate offers on your website and in your overall marketing pitch.  Your key team members on the marketing and sales side are gathering at a meeting to discuss what the offers should be the first to be used.  You’ve scheduled a 1 hour meeting with three key managers and the first part of the meeting is used for each manager to suggest an offer which they feel would be effective

You can already picture this meeting:

• a set of very distinct and unconnected ideas for offers are generated based solely on the memory and experiences of the managers
• When the time of decision comes, a great deal of difficulty arises in coming to agreement
• Each manager is adamant about their offer being the right one and
• Time starts running out with no clear decision or plan being be formulated

So what went wrong
Having been through this exact meeting scenario on several occasions, our team can share what we see as missing in the process.  Any gathering of managers, particularly ones with considerable experience in the business will quickly fail to generate decisions if the strength of the options is too low.

The reason: managers’ experience and instinct will tell them that the right answer hasn’t been put on the table as an option

A better approach
Based on years of experience with these types of meetings, we’ve focused on a two stage methodology for successful decision making meetings:

Stage 1: We use research and brain storming to generate a list of options for the decision to be made (example a list of potential offers for prospects).  We also organize and rank each option based upon the impact it will have specifically on the sales cycle and for whom it will be effective

Stage 2: A structured management meeting, where additional ideas are added based on managers’ input and then ranked in the same way as the other ideas.  Then a systematic shortlisting and selection process is followed to determine the final preferred option.

This approach:

• Starts from a stronger place (more options fully analyzed)
• Allows a smoother decision process
• Yields a much higher level of consensus and buy-in and most importantly success rate

Its now a standard part of our work with clients on their web and marketing strategy: providing an engine for more ideas/options for key management meetings.  We’ve seen it consistently delivery better results and that’s we have  a dedicated research function to provide those options to our clients.