Managing Meetings Masterfully

After so much adjustment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people have become increasingly aware of the difference between necessary and unnecessary meetings. Clear communication has also become a necessity because of this. While some procedures are better carried out in an email, others thrive in a face-to-face setting. As a proposal manager, how do you find the perfect balance of communication? If you schedule too many lengthy meetings, your team may compose a unified proposal, but at the cost of morale. If there are too few, your team could miss key customer focused details and produce a lacking proposal. Only Invite Who Needs to be There. People are busy, and proposal timelines are hardly as long as writers prefer them to be. When you limit meeting attendees to only the necessary, it prevents burnout in others who may have unnecessarily attended. This also frees up time for others to continue work on the proposal. Keep Meetings Short. If you hold regular stand-up meetings, keep them short. “Stand-up” meetings are based off the idea that having participants stand would keep the meeting brief. Abide by this guideline. Stand-up meetings are also short to keep everyone on topic. If issues arise during a stand-up meeting, determine who needs to participate in a problem-solving discussion, set a time to meet, and move on to the next item. Adjust Reviews Based on Available Time. Color team reviews are strategically placed throughout standard business winning processes to help produce winning proposals. While these reviews are important, they can eat away valuable time. Know when to skip or condense a review. During proposal development, reviews should focus on proposal content and messages before drafting text and near-final content compared to the customer’s need and evaluation criteria. If you are pressed for time and need to skip reviews focused on other areas, skip them. Meeting face-to-face—whether in-person or virtually—provides benefits like real-time collaboration and clarification. However, scheduling too many meetings quickly becomes cumbersome for attendees. As available time and resources fluctuate, determine which meetings are vital to developing a winning proposal.