Top 3 Things You’ll Learn
- How the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted client meetings
- Six best practices for successful virtual meetings
- Creative ideas to engage your clients in a virtual meeting setting
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, travel restrictions are helping us keep our physical distance as we stay safe at home, but we still need to interact with one another and our clients to keep business moving. For those of us who are used to meeting face-to-face, it may be challenging to find ways to create meaningful interactions over a virtual platform. We compiled these best practices for successful virtual meetings, as well as our team’s creative ideas to help you engage with your clients in the process.
Six Best Practices for Your Virtual Meeting
- Include a tone of care and concern. Start by making sure everyone is healthy and okay.
- Relax the audience about the meeting “formality” early in the process. Let them know it’s okay if they aren’t dressed in business clothes, don’t have a home office set up, have background noise, etc.
- Associate the name of the individual with the caller number if participants didn’t utilize the pin. This will help you to know who is talking and can refer to them by name.
- Acknowledge that you might be “technologically challenged” and may not be smooth in moving from slide to slide while speaking to the camera.
- If you’re sharing slides, send the presentation deck ahead of time.
- Stop more often to ask if anyone has a question, especially if your meeting participants aren’t using their webcams during the meeting.
Looking to create meaningful interactions in virtual meetings with your clients? These ideas can help you make a lasting impression.
Creative Ways to Engage Your Clients
Our Business Development team shared some of their favorite ideas for creating engagement in our new virtual meeting environment:
- Add a theme to your meeting to break the ice and help you get to know your audience better. This can be as simple as asking everyone to wear their favorite hat, so that they don’t feel pressured to get dressed up. You could invite pets to the meeting and have a little show and tell, to help participants feel at ease if their pets make noise in the background. Or with the right audience, a happy hour meeting in the late afternoon could be a fun replacement to the in-person meeting you would normally have.
- Offer your clients a food delivery gift card with an invitation to have a virtual lunch meeting or virtual happy hour. This is a nice way to support eateries and restaurants in the local communities where your clients are located.
- Offer your clients a timely token for attending the meeting. For example, if you have sewing talents, offering participants a homemade mask is a good way to provide something useful while showing you care.
- Play a game of meeting Bingo to keep the interaction lively. Use an online Bingo card generator to provide participants with their Bingo card in advance, and offer winners a digital gift card.
- Contract a local chef to join the video call for the second half of your meeting to help your clients learn to cook an easy homemade meal. Letting your audience know in advance will create excitement and interest.
Conducting work meetings from your new home office has become part of our new normal, as least temporarily. Fortunately, the options for creating a memorable meeting are endless with just a little creativity and preparation. We encourage you to try a new idea at your next virtual meeting and share them with us on social media.
