Are you sick of meetings that could have been an email, as I am?
Now, the reason most meetings fail
to deliver is because they don't have an agenda.
A successful meeting needs a successful agenda.
Now, if you're tired of wasting your time,
sit tight, because I'm going to share with you my unique, foolproof
multi-purpose client meeting template that you can use.
And we're going to do it with mind maps. Sit tight.
Hi, heroes, welcome back, it's Warwick here.
Founder at Account Manager Tips, host of The KAM Club and on a mission
to help busy key account managers get results.
So why do you need an agenda?
Well, an agenda defines the purpose of your meeting.
It sets out your objectives.
It makes clear to participants why they
are there and organises your entire meeting.
So without it, it's doomed. Right.
So I'm going to share with you today in this video my outline for a successful
agenda and then I'm going to do a tutorial.
I know it's been like forever.
We are going to jump into the computer
and I'm going to show you how I transfer that agenda into a mind map and create it
with MindMeister into a template that you can grab for free.
I'm going to put the links below in the description.
All right, let's get into it.
Step number one, define your meeting purpose.
Now, there are five categories that I
typically come across, of sort of meeting intent, when I'm building my meetings.
So let me run through them real quick.
Number one are learning meetings.
They're typically one-way meetings,
presentations, sharing information or potentially educating your audience.
Things like demos. Sharing.
Those are meetings that are like updates, reviews. Where you look back at past
performance or discussions where you want to create conversations with people.
Creation meetings, creating meetings.
They're where you are looking at design or
process or just brainstorming and idea creation.
Solution meetings.
That's where you looking to identify and fix problems and then decision making
meetings, which, you know, does what it says on the tin to make decisions.
You've established your meeting purpose
Step number two is to define the meeting objectives.
What do you want to get out of that meeting?
What does everybody who is attending want to get out of the meeting? What are your
ideal next steps? What are you hoping to achieve from the meeting?
Simple.
Next step number three is to identify participants.
Who do you need there to make the meeting a success?
Here are some types of roles that you might want to consider when you're
building out your potential participant attendee list.
Do you need subject matter experts,
people that have knowledge that can bring context or expertise to the conversation?
What about making sure you get the ultimate decision maker in the room so
you can fast track your project and get yes or no or maybes made on the spot?
What about getting those responsible for implementation of any decisions?
So these are the ones that once, you know,
agreement is made, they're going to have to go and make it happen.
Direct stakeholders, end users, people that are affected by the decisions
or the conversations that are taking place.
You may want to loop in somebody from H.R.
or Legal if you're actually talking about people or potentially regulatory or
contractual things where you might want to have their expertise present.
And then just people that have good experience, people that know their stuff.
That have been around, that have a wide perspective or a unique
perspective that can add some extra dimension to the meeting conversation.
Now, when you invite them, make sure that every single participant is
expressly clear on why they are there, what they need to bring,
what they need to prepare and what you would like them to contribute.
And that includes your internal colleagues as well that might be joining you.
You don't want to step over each other's toes during the meeting.
So make sure everybody knows who's
leading, what they're there to do, what conversations you want them to start
or what you want them to contribute to or present.
Okay? Now, when you're the host of the meeting,
it's a little bit easier to understand your objectives, your contribution,
what you want to get out of the meeting because it's your meeting.
You prepared the whole thing.
When you're a participant, it can be less clear.
People aren't always so great sending agendas or setting good agendas.
So if you find yourself being invited
to a meeting that doesn't have an agenda, ask for one.
And if they don't have one, at least be clear and ask them why you're there?
Why did they invite you? What do they want you to do?
What do they want you to prepare or contribute?
So that you don't go there empty-handed or uncertain about why you're even there.
Your time's limited. It's precious.
So make sure that you use it wisely.
Now, as you're going through preparing
the agenda or preparing your contribution to the meeting, you can probably come up
with a bunch of questions that you might need answered.
Don't spring them on participants during
the meeting, share them in advance, incorporate them into your agenda.
And one great tip is to turn your meeting or agenda topics into questions.
Super effective way, cuts down on time and
gives you a head start in terms of your meeting objectives.
So now you built your agenda. Send it.
Don't spring it on people during the meeting.
Send it well in advance.
I usually send mine around three times.
I'll send the first one as a draft and invite people to let me know if they
need anything modified or want to include anything extra.
Then I will send a second and final agenda
once I've incorporated everybody's feedback.
And then the day before the meeting I'll
send my confirmation agenda just to make sure that nothing's changed.
Everything we agreed is in place, especially if it's on-site.
You want to make sure that catering's sorted.
The meeting room is booked.
That the audiovisual that you might need is there.
Reconfirm everybody's attending and make
sure everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing so that they can catch up real
quick if they have forgotten that they were going or what you asked them to do.
So there's a bunch of reasons why I use
mind maps for my meeting agendas and why I think you should consider it too.
To begin with, mind maps are a visual,
creative, organised, structured way to present and connect your ideas.
When you use a cloud-based platform like
MindMeister, which I'm just about to show you, you introduce a whole range
of functionality that turns your meeting agenda into something incredible.
You can bring in features like voting on topics.
You can simultaneously collaborate with all participants on the agenda.
You don't have to communicate by email, so you cut down on a bunch of time.
You can add attachments to, you know,
inform the agenda and bring extra dimension to it.
You can add meeting notes.
You can add tasks.
You can colour code your items
to highlight priorities and a whole bunch of other stuff.
So it's very, very powerful.
And what that does is create this sort of single source
of truth. This complete record of the meeting from start to finish.
And it's fully transparent.
It's not sitting in your CRM, in your word documents, in your email,
and difficult for your clients to find out what went on and when and where and how.
It's all there in one place for everybody to see.
So I absolutely love it.
So let's dig into how I create mind maps in MindMeister.
Well, here we are in the MindMeister dashboard.
Now there are a bunch of different templates for a bunch of different reasons
and I use mind maps for all sorts of purposes.
Today we're just going to focus on meetings.
I'm going to share a template with you in a minute, but I wanted to show you how
easy it is to create something from scratch.
So let's start there, huh?
So I'm just going to create a brand new mind map.
And let me just make this a little bit
bigger for you so you can see what I'm doing.
So the central node is your meeting topic.
So let's call this an implementation kick-off just to make it simple.
Then I'm going to add the time and place.
I will add the objectives,
which is those ones we talked about earlier, learn, create,
solutions, decision making, that sort of thing.
Then I'm going to add the agenda,
there the various topics you want to talk about.
I'm going to put a placeholder for ideas.
You might think of this like your parking
lot where you want to just capture things that come up during the meeting.
Then I'm going to put decisions.
So if we come to any decisions or if we
need to make any future decisions, then I will capture that here.
And I will also put down notes where I can track all the meeting notes.
So it's all there. And I will also put down participants.
There you have it.
Done.
There's your agenda.
So simple, so easy, done in a flash and I'm going to share
with you now this very same sort of structure where I have introduced some
of the features that are available in MindMeister.
Here we are in the template that you can
get for free, links are in the description below.
You need a MindMeister account, of course,
but it doesn't cost anything to set one up on a personal plan.
You can upgrade to a few more bells and whistles, which I have,
but they're not necessary to access or use this template by any means.
So go to my MindMeister, grab the link below in the description
and grab your free account and you can copy this template as is.
So here is an example of a meeting that I
had where I was implementing key account management with a client.
I put my logo here because I was the host, but you could easily put the client's logo
or you could put just a picture, anything or nothing at all.
So that's the meeting topic then.
I've got the objective.
So you can see here I've put a kind of a verb with every single objective.
We want to evaluate. We want to understand.
We want to assess. We want to look at current decisions.
We want an overview.
So it's very descriptive as to what the objectives are.
So I know what I'm clear on.
I use this little flag icons which are available in MindMeister.
I've colour-coded them. So red is the high priority.
Green is just normal priority.
I've got a calendar here for time and place.
Let me make it a bit bigger.
So again, I've got little icons.
Calendar for the date, clock for the time and a little house for the place.
Then I've got the agenda items, so I've put them in numerical order
with these little icons and I've timestamped them.
Now we were talking about questions before
and you can see I've now got the questions that I had thought about as I was
preparing the agenda and I've just whacked them into the template so that everybody
can see them and to start to think about them before we have the meeting.
I've also uploaded some documents
and presentations to help people during the meeting.
And also it means I don't have to go jumping in between applications when
I'm presenting the agenda and facilitating it.
It's all in the one place which is really helpful.
I've got the names of the participants broken down by the company.
So that's me.
And actually I've added a link to my LinkedIn profile.
So you can see when I hover over it, it says External Link.
And you know, and if you click on that, you'll go to my LinkedIn profile.
So this is great for a kick-off where you might want to add people's pictures
and links to their LinkedIn profiles when everyone's trying
to get acquainted and get to know each other better.
This can really fast track that.
Not so necessary if it's a meeting
with people that you are already familiar with.
But a great idea for a kick-off call.
This is the placeholder for notes where I can just grab notes on the meeting topics.
So note one.
Oops. Note one.
Note two. Note three, etcetera. Easy.
Same with ideas. I will just have a placeholder because
you know when you say in a meeting,
let's take that offline or let's put that in a parking lot or that's a little
bit off-topic let's get back to the agenda.
You don't want to lose that because
that can make people feel like they haven't been heard or there can be some
great ideas that you just want to revisit, but set some more dedicated time
to that and not disrupt the focus of the current meeting.
So I will capture those here.
So idea one.
Idea two etcetera you get the idea. And then decisions.
So this is where I will capture what we agreed.
So I would say so whether that is a yes or
no, whether it is just a next step that we've agreed on.
So it might be a decision to actually take
action or it might just be a decision to have another meeting.
But whatever it is, I will capture that in the decisions part of the agenda.
And that is it.
It's that simple.
You've got a lot of other features.
I'm not going to go into them now because we'll be here all day.
But there's some really great features in MindMeister where you can add.
Let me just give you a quick tour.
So these features on the right, you can make more detailed notes.
So if you want to actually instead of using the mind map, you can just use
and you've got formatting options, bullet points idea one, idea two.
So you can actually use verbatims and cut and paste and add pictures and make this
like a more interesting note with some formatting,
particularly for trying to capture a lot of detail.
This is useful when you want to go back after you've gone back to the office
and you've got some research to do or some answers to find
and putting them into this note, which you attached to the actual node
on the agenda is really, really helpful to keep the meeting record up to date.
A bunch of other features here. I won't go into them now.
Check them out.
If you want me to do a full MindMeister tutorial, drop a comment below.
Happy to do it. If there's enough interest and people want
to see how else I use MindMeister for what other reasons.
What is also great about this, you can see
you can collapse all these nodes so you can
just focus on the ones that you're
currently on in the agenda, which is helpful.
You have different views.
So I can change this view to a left-aligned.
I could change it to more of an org chart.
Which, depending on how you this is left-to-right versus up to down.
So you've got some flexibility with that.
And the final feature I want to show you
is that you can turn this into a presentation like that.
So you click on this
setup presentation.
You have the option to auto create or you can see here it's numbered.
So I can drag and drop
the see that just changed to four?
Let me move the participants up to number two.
So participants is now changed to number two, topic is number one, etc.
So you can add or remove certain nodes so you don't have to go through them
all just add the ones that you want to talk about. Auto create or make your own.
Now, when I hit play, look what happens.
See, it now creates a slideshow.
And I've got the whole thing there, so I don't have to create a PowerPoint.
I don't have to create anything else to talk through the agenda.
It's all in one place, which I absolutely love.
It's a massive timesaver.
So, my friends, that is mind maps, agendas in a nutshell.
I think it's an absolutely powerful way to actually capture the entire meeting.
It will differentiate you. It's unique.
It's fun. It grabs people's attention.
I will often go to a meeting.
I just have this up and we'll interact with it altogether.
Sometimes everybody's got their laptops
open with this in place so they can all at their own notes at the same time.
Fantastic.
I don't have to do all the heavy lifting, trying to keep track of everything so
people can just punch their own ideas in there as we go.
Great for brainstorming.
And you have a fantastic way
of facilitating conversations. You're not going between applications and emails
and documents and hard drives and PowerPoints.
It's all there. It looks great.
And you've got a presentation ready to go if you need it.
Now, listen, I got a challenge for, you know, if you're up for it? Your very
next meeting, why don't you put your agenda through MindMeister, give it a go,
then come back, drop a comment below and let me know how you did.
I'd love to hear from you.
All right Heroes that's a wrap on meetings, mind maps, templates,
agendas, and how to make sure your next meeting is not a waste of time.
Now check out my video on best questions to ask your client to get to know them.
I'm sure you'll find some great stuff in there.
Don't forget to like, share and subscribe. I mean, you're already here.
What have you got to lose?
And if you need me, you know where to find me Heroes.
Until next time. Bye for now.