Rage against the meeting machine (with better presentations)

You know you’ve had a productive meeting when everyone emerges from the room awash in a happy golden glow. In part this is surely because it feels great to get stuff done, but it’s likely also due to the fact that a productive meeting is an unexpected surprise. 

A quick web search surfaces our general feelings about team get togethers. Between articles like BBC’s “How to Look Interested in a Boring Meeting” and Telegraph Media’s “How to Cope with Boring Workplace Meetings” it’s clear: meetings are lame and we mostly don’t want to attend them. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change how necessary they are, or how expensive. (In one study of time budgeting, Bain & Company found that a single weekly meeting of mid-level managers was costing one organization $15M per year.) Some other wacky stats about meetings, courtesy of visual.ly: 

• There are 25 million meetings per day in the United States.
• Executives consider more than 67% of their meetings to be failures.
• People spend up to 4 hours a week preparing for status update meetings.
• 92% of business professionals admit to multi-tasking during meetings.

Of course, at their best, meetings help to sustain clear lines of communication. Every team member has items that should be discussed, and chatting can help cut down on one-off questions and distractions. In the interest of success, time, and lots and lots of money, it seems ditching meetings ( or whatever you want to call them– scrums, assemblies, rendezvous) isn’t the answer. And neither are the everyday tips, such as standing up, time budgeting, or clear agendas. While mainstream tricks can be useful, it’s pretty likely you’re already using them and still seeing eyes glaze over. Instead, we suggest sprucing up your meetings with — dun dun dun! — better presentations. 

We recently checked in with our users to see which meetings were the most common in their own workplaces, and it came as no surprise that marketing and sales gatherings reigned supreme. In an effort to unleash the productivity within, we’ve got an eBook that will help you tap into some of the most transformative trends in modern day presenting. Download Presentation Design 101 for Sales and Marketing below to learn all about the benefits of conversational presenting, as well as how to design one that will engage your audience from beginning to end.