At Motivation Excellence, we believe the most impactful meetings go beyond presentations and agendas. They become elevated experiences designed to inspire performance and create meaningful emotional value.
Whether you’re brand new to hosting a meeting or a pro looking for a trusted partner to take on the lift, our experts act as an extension of your team, ready to bring fresh ideas, engaging elements and data-driven outcomes to your next meeting or event.
Let’s take a moment to go over some Meetings 101 tips, then dive into some Master Class advice so you can bring your meetings from bland to booming with some intentional tweaks.
Meetings & Events 101
Feel free to skip this section if you’ve already moved past elementary improvements, or take the short read as a refresher before moving on to more advanced tips.
1. Know Your Why
The logistics of your meeting or event are certainly important. Selecting the venue, securing needed equipment, registering your attendees and knowing budget parameters are obviously on your to-do list. But the first thing you want to hone in on is why you are holding the meeting in the first place. What are the goals? How will you measure success? Without the “why,” the “how” can be misdirected.
Your why may be to:
- Energize your internal sales team for the year ahead
- Recognize top performers in your channel network
- Bring independent agents together to build relationships
- Celebrate milestones and company achievements
- Train on new solutions, products and branding for a unified front
When you clearly define the purpose of your event, putting the details together like content, entertainment and experiences can support that outcome.
2. Identify the Value for the Attendees
Once you know your why, follow it up with asking yourself, “What’s in it for them?” You need to make it worth their time, even if it’s a required part of their job.
What will they walk away with? Better knowledge? Motivation to improve performance? A stronger relationship with your company? Some great stories to tell back home?
More than one answer can be correct here, but deciding up front what’s most important will help as you set the agenda, prep speakers and create the overall flow from start to finish.
Your executive team can definitely guide you to defining the value they want attendees to get, but harvesting information directly from the source is great, too. A pre-event survey can bring you up to speed on expectations and shared desires. Regular engagement elements, such as texts, emails, or short videos leading up to your meeting, can also help you start the value story for them. Plus, you can really ramp up anticipation and excitement before anyone sets foot into the space.
3. Present a Polished & Interactive Experience
Boring meetings are forgettable, or even worse, your attendees feel like it was a waste of time. A Harvard Business Review study found that professionals tend to mentally check out before meetings begin, especially when they assume routine meetings aren’t worth their time. Yet when participants are thoughtfully engaged, those same events often become more valuable than expected before.
There are some easy ways to amp up meeting engagement:
- Coach your speakers to talk with the audience, not at them. Introduce questions, ask for real-life perspectives and DO NOT read from a script or slide deck. Not everyone is a naturally engaging public speaker, but everyone can learn a few good techniques to help them improve! You can also give your charismatic speakers more time on the agenda.
- Utilize interactive technology during sessions to get attendees involved. Not everyone likes to be called out of a crowd, but doing live polls, answering trivia questions and asking questions digitally allows everyone to participate without being in the spotlight.
- Give the meeting some energy with built-in breaks for movement or snacks, introduce fun break-out sessions that involve mini-lessons in magic, origami or joke telling, and intentionally schedule a wow-moment or two (depending on your meeting length). All of these create spaces perfect for emotional connections that last long after the meeting ends.
The Meetings Master Class
Congratulations on graduating from Meetings 101! Welcome to The Master Class. In this section, we’ll give you some real-world tips from our own experience creating memorable and engaging events for our clients.
As a full-service partner, our team at Motivation Excellence can tackle anything and everything your company needs to create a successful, memorable and results-driven experience.
This can include:
- Strategic experience design
- Destination and venue consulting and contract negotiation
- Immersive activities, either on-site or off
- Flight, accommodation and registration for each attendee
- Seamless event management
- Coordination of speakers and entertainment
Everything we outlined in our Meetings 101 section is enhanced to curate the type of meeting or event attendees can’t wait to be at again!
Here are a few ways we’ve turned our clients’ “whys” into attendees’ “value” while elevating the moments, expectations and results:
1. A Meeting for the History Books
A lot goes into selecting a venue. Among many other things, you need to consider the average distance for attendees to travel and space requirements that fit your needs. Whether you’re planning a local affair or you need to include an international audience, the destination city and the particular venue can create excitement and allure right away.
We work with a medical device manufacturer that needed to pull together an international meeting in a short time to introduce and train new sales teams. This meeting was spread over a couple of days and included a dozen breakout sessions and a vendor fair. This was a heavy lift, but not out of the ordinary.
What made this meeting truly special for participants was the opening evening event held at the Natural History Museum in London. A buy-out for our client, with special lighting, turned this social session into a once-in-a-lifetime event for which attendees gave glowing reviews!
2. Channel Partner Events that Spur Growth Every Year
A meeting agenda, whether it’s only a couple of hours or a few days, is the backbone of the overall experience. Our national fence manufacturing client hosts a B2B customer event for their top distributors.
In order to attend this all-expenses-paid experience, their customers compete for a limited number of spots in different categories. The event lasts three days and includes training sessions, meetings with executives and peer leaders, a vendor showcase, a variety of activities and world-class entertainment. This is a great example of how we intertwine an impactful meeting within an overall sales incentive strategy.
We work closely with our client to create a fun, themed, opening event that carries energy from day one to day three with smiles, new friends and fond memories. For a rodeo theme one year, guests were encouraged to wear western gear, interact with live longhorned steers and try their hand at various roping skills games.
The result of these immersive channel partner events is the drive for the attendees to be back year after year, which gives our client increased sales and competition among their customers.
3. Making it Easy for Everyone
Even if you have a fantastic venue and an engaging agenda, obstacles can damage the overall appeal faster than you might imagine. Not knowing where to go, or what time a session is, or even changes last-minute, creates frustration that can lead to disengagement.
Having sufficient on-site staff to help with questions or directions is critical. Proper signage and time to travel between sessions can keep the flow steady and ensure people don’t feel rushed and confused.
At Motivation Excellence, our travel incentives, meetings, and events include our proprietary technology, Inspire, to keep personalized itineraries and important notifications in the palm of your attendees’ hands. Inspire is a platform-based web app that easily saves to phone home screens, allows you to send important communications in real time and lets your attendees interact with one another through activity feeds and a photo gallery.
We get so many positive comments about Inspire that we continue to implement updates to expand its interactivity and usefulness. We love sharing Inspire with all of our clients and their participants!
Turn Your Next Meeting into an Engaging Event
If your meetings or events aren’t yielding the results you want, it is time to invest in a strategy-driven event that provides great business intelligence for you and excitement to attend the next one for them.
With more than 40 years of experience designing results-focused meetings, events and incentive programs, we create moments that motivate participants and strengthen the relationships that drive business forward. Whether it’s an internal sales meeting, a leadership retreat, or a celebration event, we’d love to partner with you!
We invite you to learn more about our Meeting & Event Planning services and Incentive Travel solutions, or reach out to us today to start a free consultation.
