Sales Clinic: Meetings of the Minds

The prevailing wisdom in American "big" business is that too many companies hold too many meetings without getting too much of anything done. That viewpoint has been shared by a wide range of prominent business figures, from Tom Peters and Steven Covey to Mike Doonesbury and Dilbert.

I remember some of the meetings I attended during my own apprenticeship in Corporate America. As clichéd as it probably sounds, I have actually attended a meeting to plan a meeting to cut down on the number of meetings that people had to attend.

Having said all of that, though, I think reprographics and wide format printers probably don't hold enough meetings. And I think that's a significant contributing factor to the "communications gap" that keeps many printing firms from realizing their full profit potential.

Internal vs. External

Let's start this discussion by drawing a distinction between internal and external meetings. By my definition, an internal meeting concerns the owner(s) and staff of the printing firm. An external meeting will involve customers, suppliers, or others with some interest in your business.

My policy for external meetings without customers involved is to attend them only when I will gain real value from them. That might mean learning more about a new product or service from a supplier, or meeting with my accountant to stay on top of the financial health of my business. (By the way, you shouldn't have any doubt that your accountant is one of your suppliers. I define that term to mean anyone you pay to provide something you need for your business.) I guess the bottom line here is that I don't go to external meetings without customers involved for fun. If you have the time for that, more power to you.

I'm not sure I go to external meetings with customers involved for fun either, but I still want to set and attend as many of those meetings as I possibly can. In my vocabulary, those meetings often go by another name. They're called sales calls!

Team Meetings

Internal meetings aren't completely for fun either, but that's not to say that they can't have a fun component to them. I think a lot depends on how owners and managers perceive their relationships with employees—are they a staff that you supervise or a team that you lead? Experience has shown that people who think of themselves as a team tend to have more fun at work in general, and they also tend to have more enjoyable and more productive meetings.

Here's another way to look at this issue. You have a staff, your challenge is to create a team, and the staff/team meeting is one of the tools you can use to make that happen. It might be a production meeting, a sales meeting, or a full-team meeting, and in fact, I think you should be running all three of those on a regular basis.

Next month: Making production meetings productive.