Meeting Skills

"In business, you don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate."

Chester L. Karrass

As part of a busy business lifestyle, we spend a large amount of our time interacting with others, in particular with our customers. Keeping them happy is as critical as understanding their needs and concerns. It is well known that a large amount of time of an office worker is spent in meetings, a large portion of which is dealing with colleagues and customers. As a result it is quite critical for anyone to improve their customer management skills and be able to handle more senior customers as their skills are improved and get better results.

In this course participants will be introduced to main aspects of managing customers in meetings. These include subjects such as establishing rapport, handling meetings, negotiating, body language and so on. For example, what if your client uses a dominant body position in a meeting room and continuously accuses you of missing deadlines? How should you reply? What if your client does not deliver on his promises and doesn’t understand the impact of his negligence on your team? How do you get him to correct his behaviour, without making him feel embarrassed? Many similar situations such as these are explored in detail in this course.

There are plenty of educational and entertaining exercises designed to help the delegates put the theory into practice. The idea is that participants should learn the skills during the course by using the new concepts they have learned in controlled exercises and role plays. This is known to increase the retention rate and is an ideal method to learn rapidly with minimum effort.

In this highly practical course participants will learn:

How to Manage Relationships

• How to interact with a customer effectively to get maximum results
• What to say, how to say it and how to look?
• How to handle potentially aggressive remarks by your customer

Body Language

• How to great a customer and establish rapport
• How to use your body language to understand others better
• How to read clusters of gestures
• How to read subconscious signals by reading palm orientation and finger layout
• What are the signals that indicate the other person is defensive?
• What is partial-arm-cross and what does it suggest?
• How to do a power gaze
• What are various leg crosses and what do they suggest?

Effective Meetings

• How to participate or hold meaningful and efficient meetings
• What are pre-meeting preparations?
• How to prepare an agenda
• What should be discussed in a typical office meeting?
• How to prepare, run and finalise a meeting
• How to avoid wasting time in meetings
• What are post-meeting activities?

Questioning Methods

• How to use various types of questioning techniques to get better answers
• How to use listening skills to get more information from your clients

Negotiation

• How to get a fair deal when negotiating with your clients
• How to set your limits when negotiating over price. What strategies are known to work best?
• How to maximise your long-term results when dealing in repeated negotiations with a particular customer
• How to reduce tension while negotiating so you can get better results and manage a meeting more effectively

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Intermediate

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Build strong relationships with your clients
• Read body language and use it to your advantage
• Lead and participate in efficient meetings to get maximum results
• Ask specific types of questions to obtain more information
• Negotiate effectively and make “fair” deals
• Participate in many educational and entertaining exercises to learn the skills quickly

This course primarily deals with customers and meetings. Many of daily interactions in an office are carried out in meeting with clients, customers, colleagues and managers. This course is designed to train the delegates to master the art of inter-personal communication in meetings.

Many office workers learn this skill on the job. Right from day one when they join a new company, they are invited to meetings and they simply observe and copy the behaviour of others in their future meetings. After all, they take others’ behaviour as the norm. However, a company culture set by socially dominant people may not be the most efficient way to handle customers. Bad habits can creep in and soon customers may start to turn away from the organisation. A systematic course on how to handle such meetings can greatly help people to understand the intricate psychological aspects of such encounters and maximise their gain.

This course contains many case studies and practicals that help the delegates to practice handling different situations under the supervision of a trainer. Course notes and exercise sheets contain all the information a trainer needs to use to guide the delegates. Workbooks contain detailed reference material useful for both the trainer and the delegates. Course guidelines, recommended reading, etc. further help trainers to quickly familiarise themselves with the course.

As with all courses from Skills Converged, you have the flexibility to edit and modify the content as you wish and integrate it with your own content.

"Just to let you know that I have been very pleased with your meeting skills materials. The instructions for trainer were clear and easy to follow and the contents were high quality."

David Cox, Portsmouth, UK

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