Strategic entrepreneurialism is an attribute as sought after today by global CEOs as it is by start-ups. It’s become an essential tactic for business survival, but despite the necessity, not all organisations are very effective at it. Think about it: how many strategy meetings have you attended with like-minded and interested parties, only to find that nothing materialises after that contact?

Why Intrapreneurship Fails

The research shows that intrapreneurship (entrepreneurship within an existing company) attempts peter out most of the time. According to Beth Altringer, who’s done the research at Harvard, intrapreneurship projects fail 70 to 90% of the time.

The difficulty in a big company, is being able to accumulate all the necessary ingredients together: the ideas and the buy-in from the people who are going to execute on the idea. Firstly, getting that buy-in in an existing company can be challenging simply by virtue of the fact that you’re introducing something new. Secondly, the people who can perform the work generally don’t have the time to contribute to developing new ideas.

How We’ve Tried To Save Intrapreneurship

In the past, companies have typically addressed the need for intrapreneurship through Research & Development (R&) Departments. There are still many companies operating like this today. Since the 90’s it has become more popular for businesses to outsource their intrapreneurship projects to innovation consultancies.

Outsourcing to innovation consultancies usually follows the process of market analyses, idea generation and prototype development. Organisations adapt the consultancy’s recommendations and take them to market. Innovation companies have their own methodologies, which may include analytical models, human centred design or Lean start-up.

Sure, not every client-innovation consultancy relationship has a happy ending, but the research also indicates that the value offered by these types of engagements can help organisations improve their chances of succeeding at intrapreneurship projects eclipse the 10 – 30% success rate.

A Novel Take On Innovation

Let’s take a look at the strategy employed by the Chief Marketing Officer at Kuoni, a travel services company. He was of the opinion that achieving different results required different behaviour, and so he considered a number of reputable consultancies for a major strategy project.

He did set some rules for the engagement. The consultancy had to be receptive of different methods. They also had to accept certain restrictions: a short turn-around and a tight budget. They had to generate and analyse results quickly, so that Kuoni could make heir decisions efficiently.

The consultancy he chose had a history of connecting global entrepreneurs with start-ups. And, even though the consultancy managed to build an entrepreneur database that spanned 35 countries, they found a huge demand from organisations seeking input on how they could become more entrepreneurial. And, rather than introducing multi-talented designers into big companies, they started introducing entrepreneurs with more diverse skill sets.

You Don’t Have Time Or Resources For This? Are You Sure?

Big organisations may claim to be tight on resources but when entrepreneurs have seen what they’ve got available, they can’t believe it. Entrepreneurs realise just how much big companies do have going for them.

In start-ups, entrepreneurs have to do as much as they can with as little resource as possible, and it’s this kind of constraint that enables them to innovate. They focus on their strengths and continue to experiment until they find new opportunities.

Diversity of ideas

One of the major reasons this approach has been successful is that the entrepreneurs do not all come from the same organisation. The company can select the skills they need for the project and it’s highly likely that team members will have worked together before.

Accelerating decision-making 

Client and entrepreneurial teams work together to create on-site prototypes, in a workshop format. Prototypes can be tested and analysed for up to six weeks so that good and bad ideas can be distinguished.

Free up your mental processes by automating your business processes. Request an invite to Cosapien and spend more time innovating.

The post Innovating In Big Companies appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

In the event that a procedure or product does not meet the standard for more than a specified number of times, it is considered inefficient and needs to be improved.

So How Does Cosapien Enable Six Sigma Practices?

Cosapien allows the purpose of the meeting series to be captured and, by default, all meetings are considered to be part of a series.

One of Cosapien’s major features is that it enables tasks to be created from the decisions that are taken at meetings immediately.

Its task management capability is integrated with quality control mechanisms:

• Each task request is show on at least two peoples’ radar outside the meeting, along with a due date and the ability to raise early warnings for the tasks that may not be completed in time
• Progress on tasks is auto-minuted in meetings for continuity
• Each task that is completed is reviewed

An employee doesn’t need to read the meeting minutes to know what their tasks are. Cosapien shows these to employees and attendees in summary form.

Six Sigma Practices And Meeting Management

Meetings are integral to Six Sigma but, as we all know, badly managed meetings are time-wasters (more on this here).

How does six sigma training enable organisations to run more effective meetings?

Team Grouping

Six Sigma recommends that groups are created based on participants’ certifications. An accurate grouping would be made up of a team of green belts that is led by a black belt. The black belt would be guided by a black belt master as when required during a project.

Effective Tools

Six Sigma encourages team leaders to empower their team members by providing the tools they need to participate effectively in a meeting. The meeting agenda should be prepared and distributed in advance to enable people to prepare.

Feedback Mechanisms

Six Sigma black belts should liaise with green belts, to gauge their feedback on the meeting’s efficiency.

Interested in using Cosapien to complement your team’s training in Six Sigma? Get an invite below.

The post How To Use Cosapien To Enable Six Sigma Practices appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

Set A Clear Purpose For The Meeting

In order to ensure that all attendees are adequately prepared and can thus contribute to the meeting, everyone needs to understand the meeting’s purpose.

Give Everyone Sufficient Notice

Empower the meeting attendees by letting them know about the meeting well in advance. Send a reminder about the meeting a day or two beforehand.

Select Key People Only

Only invite people whose attendance is essential to the purpose of the meeting.

Create An Agenda And Send It Out In Advance

Use Cosapien to email a meeting’s agenda to all participants, as well as those tasks whose will be determined by the outcome of the meetings.

Scott Thor recommends that sticking to five primary agenda items can help keep a meeting focused:

• Introduction to the project
• Lean Six Sigma (LSS) overview
• Project charter agreement
• Actionable items
• Meeting cadence

Once your agenda is captured in Cosapien’s meeting management interface, it can be used as the basis for the minutes.

Once set, the meeting chair should ensure the agenda is followed. This is essential for keeping the meeting purpose-driven and ensuring it is wrapped up on time.

Be Punctual And Start The Meeting On Time

You need to start on time to finish on time. Don’t spend too long on one particular agenda item, at the risk of the rest of the list. If you can summarise an agenda point, do so and move on. (Tip: put the intended duration as part of each agenda heading, this will help run meetings according to their time commitment.)

State The Purpose Of The Meeting At The Beginning

Remind the attendees what the objective of the meeting is to keep everyone on track and to ensure members understand what their contributions are. Do not allow anyone to deviate from the agenda items.

Take Accurate Meeting Minutes

Cosapien makes it easy to capture decisions, action items and due dates, so that the meeting chair can contribute freely to the meeting discussions.

The minutes should be shown to everyone present before the end of the meeting. They should also be distributed to all meeting attendees as soon as possible after the meeting is concluded. Cosapien makes this easy, as it automatically distributes the minutes to all attendees and the distribution list upon publishing.

Manage Different Behaviour Patterns

Invite feedback from introverted team members and limit those who speak too much.

Conflicts can be mitigated if certain guidelines are established beforehand. Ensure that all tasks are clear and understood by the people who they are requested of.

Want to try it out? Sign up below and get your invite to Cosapien.

The post Use Cosapien And Six Sigma To Run More Productive Meetings appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

What do you want to achieve?

Define a clear purpose. Meetings with a clear purpose is more likely to be effective, and more likely to be attended. (Cosapien allows you to capture the purpose for every meeting series.)

Send out the purpose, along with the invite and agenda. Repeat the purpose at the start of the meeting.

Should your meeting become side-tracked, the purpose allows you to easily steer it back on course.

How necessary is this meeting?

Is the meeting necessary at all? It might sound crazy, but many things can get done without a meeting, and this is one of the most useful productivity tips you can master. (If it can be done without a meeting, it is oft best done without a meeting.) Take the time to consider whether there are other ways to achieve your purpose.

It is often a good idea to check with your superior that they agree that your purpose is important and aligned with the needs of the company. This serves the double purpose of also aligning your work with what your superior considers to be important.

Constrain the meeting

Determine the absolute minimum amount of people needed to achieve your purpose. Only these people should be invited to the meeting. Everyone else who is important, but not critical should be on the distribution list. Check for overlap. Ie, if there are two people with largely overlapping skill then only 1 of them need to be in the meeting.

A key piece is that attendees need to have the mandate to make/approve the decisions to be taken in the meeting. Sometimes a key decision maker will want to send a representative to the meeting. Only allow fully empowered representatives. Otherwise, decisions taken will constantly be reversed. If that is not possible, run the meetings without the representative, put the key decision maker on the distribution list, and give a task to a person in the meeting to get approval on certain decisions before the next meeting.

Determine the absolute minimum amount of time needed to achieve your purpose. Add time allocations to agenda item titles, e.g., “Opening (5 min)”. This will help keep a tight schedule, and also helps people understand the weighting of the different sections.

This combination of attendees (per hour rate) and time constraints allows you to measure the cost of your meeting. You can measure the RoI by reflecting that against the purpose of the meeting.

Constraining increases the effectiveness of meetings by

• Makes conversations quicker, and more easily kept on point
• Minimises cost to company

Come prepared

Pre-minute the meeting:

• It prepares the chair better for their meeting.
• This is especially important if the chair is also the scribe, as it minimises interruptions.

Bonus tip: Ask the person responsible for each section to mail the scribe their pre-minuted section before the meeting (including presentations, reports, etc for attachment).

Before the Meeting

• Follow-up on overdue tasks before the meeting. Ie, remind attendees of overdue tasks, and that you expect to see them addressed before the meeting.
• Send the agenda out before hand. This way all parties know what the meeting will entail, and can better prepare for the meeting.

Bonus tip: Introverts perform better when they can prepare for a meeting (ie, send out the agenda at least 24h in advance).

Develop a rhythm, ie, “this is how it is done”

Have a regular cadence for meetings. Greater productivity will result if a meeting is held at a set interval (e.g., weekly) with clear expectations of each person on what they will be reporting on each time (e.g., pipeline report and all experiments ran) with the questions that will be asked (e.g., what did you learn).

Send a clear and consistent message on expectations that before meetings the tasks either be completed or that new deadlines be agreed. (Both of which can be easily done in Cosapien.)

Minute all key decision and discussions. Do this in the 3rd person so that minutes are easily read in future. Minute as if you have no insider knowledge of the meeting, so that it can be understood in 3 months. As people change on your project, these discussions and decisions will be critical to avoid scope creep, and to maintain focus (ie, avoid wasting time on rehashing past decisions). Bonus tip: Include assumptions and reasoning in decisions, so that they make sense when revisiting them

Send the minutes out to all attendees and distributees as soon as possible after the meeting. (Cosapien automatically does this for you, as soon as you publish the meeting minutes.) This way attendees receive the minutes with their tasks while the meeting is still fresh in their minds.

Follow-up after minutes are sent out that everyone agrees to do the tasks captured in the minutes. (Integrated into Cosapien, as it splits out all task request from minutes into individual requests.) Otherwise, people arrive at the next meeting claiming that the scribe captured the task wrongly or that they didn’t know about it.

The productivity tips above will help you improve the effectiveness of your meetings. Interested in using Cosapien to help you execute on those tips? Join here.

The post Productivity Tips For Minuting Meetings appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

As human beings we are largely an amalgamation of the habits (ie, stimulus-response behaviour) we have compounded across our lifetimes.

In general this is great: it saves us a lot of mental energy, and we can behave as we have previously done without giving it much thought.

However, as circumstance and desired outcomes change, we find that previous behaviours no longer serve us that well (and some never did). We want to change habits but we find it really difficult to see it through. These changes can be anything from cutting down on sugar and starting regular exercise, to swopping pen and paper for Cosapien to minute meetings and manage tasks. To make matters worse environmental cues reinforce existing behaviours, hindering us from changing habits.

Unless we are really great meditators, it is difficult for us to interrupt the stimulus-response behaviour of habits, or even be aware of it.

Luckily there are techniques for changing habits. The leading authorities are:

• “The Power of Habit” by Duhig
• “Switch” by the Heath brothers
• “The 8-Step Process for Leading Change” by Kotter

Key pieces in the above include:

1. Set clear internal motivations towards the new behaviour. If we have a clear understanding of why we want to change, we can use that in our internal dialogue to help motivate us.
2. Frame the behaviour to be changed, as a positive outcome that is well defined and measurable. E.g., instead of, “I don’t want to be fat”, we can frame it as, “I want to walk 1-km every morning.” Amorphous outcomes can easily overwhelm us. Whereas, well defined and measurable habits cost less mental energy when considered, and give us a clearly sense of victory when accomplished.
3. Recognise the stimuli that lead to the old habit, and rewire them to trigger the new habit. The stimuli could be time of day, stress, a certain room. etc. Once, you are aware of what this stimulus is, you can use it to explicitly trigger the desired habit.
4. Make sure that the reward of both the new and old habits are similar. This way, instead of fighting the reward centers in your brain, you are co-opting them to help you reinforce the desired habit.

Sometimes the above requires experimentation to find out what all the pieces are. Keep experimenting till you find something that works for you in changing habits.

Pro tip:

Tell friends, family and colleagues about your new habits. Most people find the social pressure helps them keep up the change.

Why Is It Difficult To Switch From A Manual Process To Technology?

Whether you’ve recently get a new smart device, need to learn a new software program, or want to transition from minuting your meetings with pen and paper to Cosapien, read on.

The reason for switching to using a technology needs to be clear in your mind.
Eg, it is time to switch to Cosapien if

• You are frustrated with using spreadsheets or pen paper to try and keep track of tasks.
• Attendees arrive at meetings, with previous tasks not completed.
• Attendees make excuse for tasks not done, like “That is not what agreed” or “I didn’t have time to read the minutes”.
• All the minutes are not kept in one searchable, easy to find, location
• Tasks are being completed, but the quality are not up to scratch.
• You don’t have an overview of what you need to do (across all the projects).
• You don’t have an overview of what others need to do for you (across all the projects).

Changing Habits Is Challenging

Changing from manual to tech-based processes requires discipline. Why’s that?

Well, with manual processes we could allow ourselves some variation, and even some latitude in whether we followed them at all. And, when we start using tech, these deviations become impossible to miss.

Standardisation

A lot of the time, people in an organizations do whatever they feel like. They all pay lip services to a methodology, but everyone did just the components that suited them, and in ways that suited them.

But when everyone is forced to follow the same process through, the company as a whole functions much more effectively. That is, if the process was well designed. If the whole company does not function better, then it is a great indication that the process needs to be reworked.

Badly Designed Tech

Badly designed tech makes it more work to use tech than it would’ve been to do it manually.

Signs of bad tech:

• Inflexibility: what you need to do is not actually possible in the system, and to make it work the complexity of what needs to be done explodes into multiple tasks.
• Requiring unnecessary information (instead of what is pertinent to do the work). Which adds unnecessary extra work load.
• Slow system response times. This is frustrating, and robs people of their drive at work.

Systemic automation can create higher group and individual efficiency, when designed to complement the human mind. If you’re looking for tech that has been purpose-engineered for process efficiency, and that supports you in changing habits request an invite to Cosapien.

The post Changing Habits And Learning Tech appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

So what is prioritisation?

It’s the art of ranking tasks and activities in their order of importance. And while there may be the odd occasion that it warrants a judgment call, it’s primarily a simple cognitive task.

The problem comes in when, once we’ve prioritised, we start to consider everything on the to-do list as “important”. We tell ourselves that we’ll get to the less important tasks “later” but, as you probably know, later never comes around.

Remembering that your time and attention span are limited resources and, while it may be tough to admit, there is a point at which you will not be able to address all the demands that are made of you.

Prioritisation is necessary but it may not be able to get all those things done. What you need is triage. If you were a medical practitioner in a medical emergency you would be left with making the decision of who needs help immediately, who doesn’t and who’s beyond being saved.

So how do you cope?

Reframe It

Change the way you think about your never-ending to-do list. Your inbox is always going to be full, your phone will continue to ring and your personal commitments will continue to demand from you. Working longer hours is unlikely to change that.

Start Using The Right Tools

Task management tools like Cosapien enable you to prioritise to-do lists, to make critical decisions that affect productivity. Use Cosapien to help you with triage; to determine where that cut-off point is for you.

The Art Of Saying No

Declining unproductive tasks and explicitly saying “no” to people requires some emotional toughness. You may not have realised it, but when you are confronted by unreasonable demands you start to feel upset, anxious, scared. The thing is, when you are in a stressed state, you are less likely to even notice them.

The good news is that you can manage your emotional state and reactions with some simple changes:

1. Update your mental model to make allowance for the importance of emotions and the way they affect your thoughts and ability to make decisions. Your beliefs shape your experiences.

2. Take care of your physical self by getting enough sleep and regular exercise. Just making these changes can improve your ability to understand and regulate your emotions.

3. Practice the art of mindfulness. Choose a reflective process like meditation or keeping a journal so you can better direct your thoughts and gain new perspectives on your daily experiences.

4. Expand your emotional repertoire. By giving yourself access to a wider variety of words that describe how you feel, you’ll communicate more effectively with other people, and start to understand yourself better.

In summary

Prioritisation can help you to cope with the demands of work and life to a point. In order to feel more fulfilled, you need to practice three other key skills:

1. Reframe the way you understand the demands of work and life. Realise that there is no end-point when it comes to your to-do list.

2. Use better tools like Cosapien to help you with prioritisation and triage. Automating processes like prioritisation frees up your mental resources so they can be used on more important tasks.

3. Get used to saying no. Agreeing to everything that gets thrown your way is impractical and has emotional repercussions that will underpin your thoughts and behaviour.

Improve Your Emotional Resilience By:

1. Updating your mental models to make space for emotions.
2. Looking after your physical body by getting enough rest and regular exercise.
3. Practising mindfulness through medication, journaling or other self-reflexive activities.
4. Broaden your vocabulary so that you have more words available that describe how you feel. It will not only benefit the people you communicate with, but the way you understand and behave yourself.

Get your invite to Cosapien below. It will help you automate your task list and make your decision-making process more manageable day to day.

The post Time Management & The Art Of Prioritisation appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

Tell People How You Would Like To Be Communicated With

Not everyone is a fan of email. Some people hate reading and writing, and find they get more done with telephone calls. Others are too busy on their feet during the day and prefer to respond to emails when they have some down time. Whatever your preference, it’s worthwhile letting others know what your preferred communications channels are. That is, of course, if you want them to use them.

Request Meeting Agendas

As we’ve said before, unproductive meetings account for a tremendous amount of wasted workplace time. If you’re invited to a meeting, request the agenda beforehand. In this way you can determine what can be address over email (or a telephone call). You can also gauge how useful attending the meeting will be to you before you commit.

Take Stock Of Who’s Been Invited

Have a look at who else has been invited to the meeting. The first question you should ask yourself is “Do I need to be there?”. The second most important question you should ask yourself is “Will the right people be there?”

If the decision-makers are not present at the meeting it’s likely to be a time waster and you’ll have to do a repeat performance for the real decision-makers.

Take Some Responsibility For Other People Arriving Prepared

It may come as a surprise but many people don’t prepare for meetings. Even those who request a meeting with you may arrive under-prepared and badly researched. And, aside from creating a bad first impression, they’ll probably waste your time too.

If you’re meeting with someone for the first time don’t be afraid to ask them what they want to discuss. It will ensure you both arrive at the meeting on the same page.

In Summary

1. Tell people how they should engage with you. Give them an incentive to use this system. If you’re not an email person and would prefer a 2 minute phone call, telling others to expect an email response in 36 hours (insert your average email turn around time here), will probably do the trick.

2. Don’t go to meetings without agendas. Uncontrolled meetings are a waste of time. Request the agenda so you can gauge how productive the meeting will be.

3. Check out the other meeting attendees. If the key decision-makers will not be there, it’s likely to be a waste of your time.

4. Screen the people who want to engage with you. If someone requests a meeting, interview or phone call, find out what it’s about. It could be 10 minutes of your life that you never get back.

Need help controlling your time management? Get an invite to Cosapien and increase your productivity today:

The post Why You Can’t Blame Other People For Wasting Your Time appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

What does it mean and, more importantly, what does it say about you? Well, the short answer is that the way you behave today is a really strong indicator of how you’ll behave tomorrow. It’s called banking on future time, and it’s pretty unusual for this type of behaviour to manifest with productive results.

It’s self-sabotaging behaviour too, because you’re not taking full advantage of the time you have available in the present moment. And, predictably, when later comes, and the task is not done, you’ll feel the ripple effects of guilt, frustration and probable burn out (by the time all those deferred tasks catch up with you). If you really want to beat procrastination read on…

How does this manifest?

You procrastinate about certain tasks, telling yourself that you will work better and more productively when you’re alone at the office. Instead what happens when everyone leaves, is that you find yourself feeling tired.

You avoid making real progress on a big project, when you have smaller windows of time, because you want to wait for a day when you have a full block of time at your disposal. Of course, that doesn’t happen. Instead you find yourself in a state of panic at the thirteenth hour, finishing your project at the last minute.

Not productive right?

So, what conscious changes do you need to make to improve your time management skills, beat procrastination and get more done?

Rule Out All Future Options

If you get into the habit of deferring tasks to weekends or after hours, you will be more likely to procrastinate. It’s more challenging to “do it later” because you will be plagued by guilt, and you’ll be tired.

So how do you fix it? Allocate times during your work day to complete specific tasks. Plan your day or week in advance by setting certain timelines to complete your tasks and projects. Extended deadlines present a greater chance of procrastination: if you’ve got an entire month to complete a presentation, for example, break the presentation up into sections and allocate a timeframe to complete each section so that the final project is ready by the end of the month.

Use Cosapien to task yourself (and other people if you’re working on a team) and allocate due dates for sub-tasks so you can complete projects on time.

This approach will help you to align your calendar with your task list with a view to helping you recognise that you will run out of time if you don’t address your projects in smaller segments. There won’t be an opportunity to defer the work to tomorrow, because tomorrow will bring a new set of tasks with it.

Book Your Free Time Up

If you have lots of free time available, you’ll be more likely to procrastinate on work tasks. Instead make sure you do have personal commitments in your free time. Start enjoying your time off. When you do, you’ll be less likely to want to use it for work commitments.

Standardise Your Schedule

You may be able to justify surfing your favourite social network all day with the promise that you’ll catch your work up later but it’s less than ideal. If you do ever get to it, your guilt will probably distract you from doing a good job, or conversely, you’ll end up with burn out from pushing yourself too hard.

So how can you hack this unproductive habit? Well you may be able to take a note from the anti-smoking handbook. Behavioural economist Howard Rachlin performed a study which showed how smokers who were told to smoke the same number of cigarettes every day were able to reduce the amount they smoked, without being told to smoke less. When smokers realised that by smoking a whole pack of cigarettes today, they would need to smoke the whole pack on subsequent days, they chose to modify their own behaviour.

Allow yourself to make the choice to invest the same number of hours to working every day. If you spend three hours on the internet today, do you want to continue this behaviour for the rest of life?

Beat procrastination , change your behaviour today and get better results tomorrow:

1. Stop banking on future time; there’s no time like the present. Align your calendar with your to-do list and allocate certain time frames to complete tasks. Tomorrow will bring with it another eight hours of productivity, but also a new set of tasks to be fulfilled.

2. Make commitments for your personal time. If your personal time is booked up with fulfilling activities, by deferring your tasks, you’ll be missing out on the things you enjoy.

3. Reduce variance in your schedule and routinise the way you spend the hours in your day. Your behaviour today will determine your behaviour tomorrow. Do you want to spend the rest of your days at work and the rest of your nights working?

Need help routinising your day? Receive an invite to Cosapien, beat procrastination and maximise your productivity.

The post “I’ll Do It Tomorrow”: Time Management Tips To Beat Procrastination appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

And while face-to-face meetings do still have a lot of value, virtual meetings are a major time-saver, particularly in cities where congested traffic can turn a one-hour meeting into a three-hour foray out of the office.

Even if you don’t want to throw your boardroom table out, learning the rules for conducting virtual meetings can be really valuable, especially during times where you need a great deal of input, need to meet with people who are physically far away or are simply pressed for time.

Here are five techniques to help you hold effective meetings and get everyone on the same page, even if they’re not sitting around the same table.

Establish Clear Rules Of Engagement

In order to hold a focused, outcomes-based meeting, the attendees need to be physically and mentally present. You may not need a boardroom but the environment in which the attendees physically find themselves should be conducive to full participation.

That means background noise and distractions should be filtered out and the person should be able to concentrate fully on the discussion at hand.

Control The Meeting

Use Cosapien to pre-minute the meeting so everyone knows what agenda items should be discussed. Direct questions using names so there’s no confusion about who is being addressed.

If you find certain people are not engaging in an expected manner, bridge the conversation by redirecting it to the person who is responsible for the agenda item.

Nurture Two-Way Communication

Whether you are doing a voice or video meeting, the meeting should be structured so that the communication is not entirely one-sided. This is where video interaction can provide value, because without being able to see expressions and read body language, communication may be less effective.

Chats and hang-outs can be equally useful, as you can request input from a lot of people and have them all provide it simultaneously.

Cosapien is built around social contracts and feedback mechanisms so it is not all left up to the meeting chair or the person who is speaking. The system has been engineered so that the outcomes of a meeting are co-created by everyone who participates in it.

Don’t Feel Awkward About Silences

It is likely that you will experience those moments of silence and the flow of the meeting may seem interrupted. This doesn’t mean you need to fill the silence or introduce something new for the moment to pass. It is more likely to mean that the rest of the participants are still absorbing it and need a few moments to process it.

Let Virtual Meetings Bridge The Gaps

There will come a time when you have no option other than a virtual meeting. Maybe you acquire a new client in a different part of the world. Perhaps your star sales person is in another city. Whatever the reason, you can use virtual meetings to bridge geographical and cultural gaps.

Make it fun; create value for the participants by monopolising on the positives of the channel you are communicating on.

In summary

Running virtual meetings is an essential skill for busy people. Our five tips for virtual meetings include:

1. Attendees should be in an appropriate environment that is relatively noise-free
2. Control the meeting so everyone knows what they need to speak about, and when a response is expected.
3. Ensure two –way communication so that it is clear all instructions and outcomes are understood. Use Cosapien to take accurate meeting minutes and follow-up tasks.
4. Embrace the silent periods. Sometimes people need a minute or two to digest what has been said.
5. Make it fun and enjoyable for everyone.

Cosapien is a meeting minuting and task management tool that can help you to hold effective virtual meetings. Keep everyone on the same page; get your invite to Cosapien below.

The post Make Virtual Meetings More Productive With These 5 Tips appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

So, how do you make those introductions and confirm those meetings?

Know Your Place

Yes, an element of humility should be exercised. Don’t assume someone wants or needs to meet with you. Your pitch or first attempt at contact should motivate exactly how you can justify taking up someone’s valuable time. In other words: prove your value and exactly what you are putting on the table.

This relates as much to what you say, as to how you say it.

Artful Language Manipulation And Time Management

In the 4-Hour Work Week Tim Ferriss acknowledges that sometimes, just getting through to the person can be a challenge.  It’s easy for a prospect to ignore emails when you don’t know him or her.

Sometimes the new contact you want to make is guarded by a PA or a secretary, who has been tasked with ensuring the executive’s expensive time isn’t wasted.

He recommends making phone calls early in the morning and after the work day has ended as this is often the easiest way to get past the “gate-keeper” and speak to the person directly. Once you have got through, use a respectful address, introduce the reason for your call and tell them immediately that you don’t intend to waste their time.

Warm Your Leads Up

It goes without saying that you are going to want to meet with people you don’t know or haven’t heard of you. The trick to getting that coveted “yes” is to establish yourself as someone who is not a total stranger.

LinkedIn is an effective platform that can help you do this. Use your shared connections to introduce yourself and explain how you might be connected to the person.

Back to the issue of time-sensitivity: it is infinitely more difficult to pitch to someone who doesn’t know you at all because they can’t see the value in investing their time in someone they don’t know. And, if you are pitching over email or the phone you’ve got to present your value proposition and outline the person return on time investment really quickly.

Make It Easy For The Person To Say Yes

In the greater scheme of meetings a 30-minute engagement may not seem like a lot of time but if you are the tenth person of the week to ask for it, it certainly adds up.

By acknowledging the person’s already-full schedule and asking for a minimum time investment, you’re already in their good books. Be considerate with the time and date; you’re less likely to score that meeting first thing on a Monday or at the end of the day on a Friday.

Give the person two or three options to choose from. Let the person make the choice based on what is most convenient.

In summary:

Productive meetings are the ones you want, but they are not always easy to get together. Our tips to help you score a meeting with any prospect include:

1. Be humble and state your value upfront

2. Be strategic about how you make contact. A phone call is always easier to control than email.

3. Make it impossible for the person to say no by providing a few reasonable options to choose from

4. Share your commonalities so you aren’t trying to pitch to a cold lead

And when you’ve done that, make you to read up on our tips on how to run effective meetings to ensure you are adequately prepared for your first engagement.

Get your Cosapien invite to ensure you run your meetings effectively and productively. Make all those meetings count by keeping accurate minutes and allocating follow-up tasks to you can maintain the relationship.

The post 4 Tips To Get You A Meeting With Anyone appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.