Meeting Planning Templates

What are these Meeting Templates?

They're a set of templates you can use for running meetings with clients: they'll help you plan your meetings, run them, and how record the outcomes/tasks from the meeting in a clear, useful way.

What are they for?

Running a meeting with a client is always a little strange: you may not know each other that well; it might all be a Zoom/video call so it's a little harder to gauge the mood in the room; no one knows who is in charge of the meeting for taking notes or even setting an agenda; and you probably still don't know exactly what the client is looking for or the actual problem they're hiring you to solve - it may not be what they told you it was.

I've had many of these meetings, and when I have a first meeting with customers, the outcome(s) that I want include:

• Understanding the problem as fully as possible - the reality on the ground right now, in as much detail as is possible.
  
• Why they couldn't fix it themselves - in a nice way, not a 'how can you not figure this out!?!' way.
  
• Is the problem they hired me for actually the problem they have?
  
• Who are the key people to talk to in the company - who's going to push my project internally?
  

So in order to help you plan, run, and get the above outcomes from this meeting, I've created these templates for you to use.

They cover three areas:

Before the meeting, the templates will help you plan the meeting:

• Did someone send an agenda (or I should if no one else did?) - for a first meeting there will be no previous meeting notes.
  
• Send a bio of yourself if you think it’s useful
  
• Have I done background research on the problem - 4 or 5 points about the area
  
• A space for some private notes - maybe I’ve been told that a certain person at the meeting is who I need to focus on etc.
  

During the meeting:

• Space for attendee names - structured in a way that you can write the names around the table.
  
• A reminder list, such as did you get everyone's name, did you describe the project, plus space for individual agenda items
  
• More general guidelines for meetings like ‘don’t ask yes/no questions’, 'keep the conversation on-topic', ask questions rather plus space for individual prompts too
  
• Space to write the actual notes of the meeting.
  
• A place to record outcomes and summaries - maybe to dos that have come out of the meeting?
  

After the meeting

• Space to write up notes (including. private ones like who’s the key player, who is going to be a problem etc.), and generic action items, like sending on the to-do list from the meeting to everyone.