The meeting agenda that helps you get the right outcome.
By Shane Lukas, Managing Director AVN
Do you ever feel you aren’t in control of your client or prospect meetings?
You go in with the intention to win additional fees or to bring in a new client, but somehow the meeting runs away from you. You can’t seem to get to the point where it feels right to ask for the business.
How can you avoid this happening again?
Why a meeting agenda is the key to success
Successful meetings come from having a clear agenda. When both you and the client/prospect know what you’ll be discussing, it stops you wasting time on irrelevant topics. What’s more, when an item is on the agenda in black and white, you won’t forget to bring it up.
Send your agenda to the client/prospect in good time ahead of the meeting. It shows that you’ve taken time to think about their situation and their business. And ask if there’s anything they’d like to add too so you can make sure that everything they want to talk about is covered.
How to create a powerful meeting agenda
To hit the sweet spot of what your client really values and what you can offer, you need to ask the right questions. Questions that are personal to that person and their business and which demonstrate your interest in and knowledge of their sector.
You can of course do this yourself and spend hours researching their industry for useful facts and figures.
Or you can enlist the help of AI to create a detailed, customised agenda.
Here’s how:
Log into ChatGPT or your preferred AI platform and tell it that you’re meeting someone from a specific industry. Give as much detail as possible. Then tell it to ask you as many questions as possible about the client/prospect. These then form the basis of your agenda.
Review the list of questions and identify which are most relevant to your discussion (possibly all of them) then add any other topics that you want to cover.
This is a highly effective way to demonstrate your commitment and professionalism as well as improving the efficiency of your meetings.
Big bonus tip
Use the meeting agenda to ask for referrals by adding a sentence such as, “Who else do you know who could benefit from our kind of help?” This prepares the client ahead of the meeting – they won’t be taken by surprise and stumped for an answer.
Asking for referrals can be daunting but if it’s written on the agenda, it’s much harder to chicken out!
For more tips on getting the most of your meetings, take a look at the resources in The Accountants KnowHow Club. In fact, there’s a recording of a fantastic webinar from AVN’s very own Emma Slack called How to Have the Best Client Meeting Ever which has dozens more tips for getting the most out of your meetings.
https://www.avn.co.uk/knowhowclub/