Dear Dave:

At my company, we have marketing meetings that go on and on and nothing seems to get accomplished. People talk about a million things and by the time we get on track, everyone’s exhausted. What should we do?

Signed,

Nodding off at the meeting table

Dear Nodding:

In a previous article, “The Vital Few, The Trivial Many,” I ranted about the 80/20 rule, and how it applied to marketing: 80% of your  marketing results come from 20% of your marketing tactics. I realize it can also apply to marketing meetings, or any business meeting. I thought of this after attending a recent unproductive meeting, and then reading “The Case of Too Many Meetings” in Harvard Business Publishing.

You can achieve 80% of a meeting’s objectives in only 20% of its scheduled allotted time.

Imagine an hour long meeting that only takes 12 minutes! Can this be so? Maybe you can get close, but first you need to recognize why meetings drag on like a shadeless, humid day:

• The meeting has no clearly stated objectives or agenda
• Objectives and agenda were not distributed in advance to meeting participants
• The meeting has an agenda and objectives, but no one adheres to them and the meeting meanders
• The meeting leader doesn’t know how to run a meeting
• There is no meeting leader
• The meeting leader can’t stop talking
• Meetings have become synonymous with social gatherings
• The wrong people are at the meeting, or some key people are missing
• A meeting presenter has once again fallen into the black hole of PowerPoint
• Some needed technology is acting up: projector, speaker phone, whatever

This is by no means a complete list of why meetings fail. But what can you do to help them succeed? For starters, don’t let any of the things listed above happen. If you are the meeting leader, then lead by example. Stay focused on objectives and keep steering participants away from distractions and towards discussion and analysis that will help you achieve goals. Choose participants because they have a specific role to play or contribution to make.

If you are a particpant, understand why you are at the meeting, come prepared to contribute in relevant manner, and don’t speak just for the sake of speaking.

Who wouldn’t want to make meetings shorter? Less time spent in meetings means more time actually getting things done. And that translates to increased efficiency and productivity, which in any economy is a boon to business.

For David Klein Marketing, I’m Dave