Editorial
The Gist
- Stakeholder priorities. Customer marketing stakeholders benefit from productive, strategic meetings.
- Planning essentials. Regular, prepared sessions foster program success.
- Strategic focus. Avoid tactical minutiae; concentrate on impactful strategy.
While most professionals would agree with the complaint that they have “too many meetings,” perhaps the real issue is that such meetings may not be particularly helpful, productive or insightful.
For customer marketing managers who are responsible for the success of their campaign or initiative, one of the key checkpoints on their program status will be their internal stakeholder meetings — either with their own teams or, more importantly, with their superiors. These meetings will provide an opportunity to convey program status and updates, and gather approvals on forward-looking plans, but, more importantly, shine the light on where progress has stalled or where bottlenecks have occurred.
Let's take a look at some tips for those gatherings of marketing stakeholders.
5 Tips for Great Customer Marketing Stakeholders' Meetings
In participating in and supporting such meetings for customer marketing stakeholders throughout our careers, we have seen some marketing practitioners manage these very well, and, unfortunately, others who don’t and allow them to go sideways — or even completely out of control.
As such, here are five tips for managing your customer marketing internal stakeholder meetings:
1. Schedule Regular Stakeholder Meetings
From the initiation of your marketing campaign program, it’s important for marketing managers to establish regular meetings with their superiors and entire stakeholder teams. In them, you can review program progress and status, show upcoming plans and timelines and gather any necessary approvals. These meetings for customer marketing stakeholders should take place monthly or even bi-weekly for an hour — you need the time to “go deep” to generate discussions, gather consensus and get clear direction. Such engagements should not be feared or dreaded — as a skilled marketing manager, you’ll be able to showcase your progress and accomplishments, show you’re “on the ball” and on top of everything, and ensure you have the time, budget, resources and commitment of everyone to ensure your program success.
2. Come Prepared
When holding your marketing stakeholder meeting, state the purpose of your meeting at the onset, what you need and/or want to achieve, and plan to put things in front of your marketing stakeholders to review or react to. While it’s OK to brainstorm “out of the box” ideas for, say, upcoming customer engagement or messaging topics, you should have plenty of those at the ready to get things rolling from previous campaigns, member survey results, feedback or reviews, etc.
On the flip side, coming to a stakeholder meeting empty handed and asking for general input can lead to anarchy, or a waste of time for participants — who will remember this come time for your next customer marketing stakeholder meeting.
Related Article: Are Your Customer Advisory Board Meetings Worth the Travel?
3. Ensure Tasks Are Progressing
If meeting preparation tasks or action item progress are falling behind schedule, the stakeholder meeting is the place to bring these up, as your superiors should have the clout to ensure things (and people) get back on track. It’s not about throwing anyone under the bus; marketing managers should be honest and transparent about their program status and bottlenecks, the potential ramifications of any issues and suggested remedies to improve — that your superiors will likely recognize and adopt.
Related Article: 5 Ways to Show Love to Your Customer Advisory Board Members
4. Focus on Strategy
You need your stakeholders to provide and approve strategic direction into the content of your customer marketing campaigns. What input of theirs do you need and what questions do you want answered? What’s coming in the next 12 months? What products are you launching or new markets are you entering? What environmental forces are impacting your customers and industry?
Marketing managers should bring their knowledge of such subjects to stakeholder meetings for review — these are the strategic topics which should be addressed in order to discover their role and potential impact on your customers.
Related Article: Tales From the Crypt: Top 6 Customer Advisory Board Horror Stories
5. Avoid Tactical Minutia
What marketing managers DON’T need to discuss or put front and center with their customer marketing stakeholders are tactical meeting minutia — meal and wine selections, color and design pallets, social activity details, tchotchke member gifts, event music selections, polling question wording, length of meeting breaks, etc.
While you can communicate these items to your stakeholders as a meetings or campaigns approach, you should only do so AFTER all strategic items are finalized, and not make tactical items into long discussions that will drain valuable executive face time. While many company executives like to approve such plans, they should have the trust in their marketing teams and event planners to handle all the details. I personally have witnessed too many long discussions with internal executive stakeholders on such trivial items that have distracted from needed strategic decisions. Don’t let this happen to you!
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Final Thoughts on Customer Marketing Stakeholder Meetings
If managed correctly, customer marketing internal stakeholder meetings can ensure your program is strategically focused and on-track for success. Managed incorrectly, and your stakeholders will “help” you on tactical items on which you didn’t need any guidance, and your program will suffer — and your customers will surely notice.
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