I hope that you have enjoyed the article “13 Tips For Big Purchasing Meetings, Part II.”

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Here at the Next Level Purchasing Association, we track the readership of all of our articles and, I gotta tell ya, the clicks to last month’s Part I were fairly low.  I suspect I know the reason.

As procurement professionals, we spend a lot of our working time in meetings.  Meetings, meetings, meetings.  And because we spend so much time in meetings, we think we know it all.

But meetings with executives are a different animal than meeting with a peer or a direct manager.  How so?

Executives are the busiest people in an organization.  As such, they don’t have a very long attention span for any one matter – they are juggling many or all of the organization’s issues in their heads at once.

So, when you speak, you gotta speak fast.  Everything you say has to be relevant.  And you better be prepared to deal with a person who has absolutely no patience for details.

That’s why tips like #8 (Prepare a single summary page) and #9 (Have a plan for if you run out of time) are so important to have top-of-mind when going into a meeting with executives.  And if you still think that meeting tips aren’t important to research, try something for me:  Try doing the exact opposite of what I recommend.  Go ahead.  Try it.

Something tells me that, after even merely glancing at the tips, you would not dare do the opposite.  If that’s the case, then you may want to spend a few minutes reading Parts I and II (and Part III when it comes out).

You’re going to make an impression in your next meeting with an executive.  Why not make it a good one?

I better see some more clicks on this article…you’ve been warned!