AUBA - Your Meeting AIDA Alternative?
There’s a school of thought suggesting that there are these four types of meeting destination;
- Awareness
- Understanding
- Believing
- Acting
Perhaps not the easiest of mnemonic to distinctly verbalise. AooBa?
Still the idea that any meeting can only have one of these destinations, and crucially will collapse when trying to cram in all four, may well hold some validity.
Especially given that you must realise where the other participants are with relation to your proposal. For instance, you cannot hope to get them to ‘act’, if they do not yet ‘believe’ your solution is the way, or even merited.
Superimposing this onto a video meeting, you could apply it split by individual agenda points.
Some may require simple awareness being received. Others full-on action willingly agreed. Or those places in-between.
I did consider how useful these would be as an additional flag next to each agenda item as sent ahead of time.
It may gain marks for transparency, yet lose by way of assumption.
There are perhaps also potential grey areas among the fringes of the progression from first to second, and second to third. Ambiguity not our friend, there.
Yet it may well be an addition to agendaring worth a try or two.
Particularly given the slower, less loud, more check-driven pace of the virtual forum.
Explicit announcement of gateways as core component could indeed be our friend.
The key feels like matching where your prospect is with respect to what you pitch. As an example offered;
“People only want to know enough to reach the next step in their discovery journey. Flooding them with information, which you might think makes you look smart, is about the dumbest thing you can do.”
In which case, even by simply asking where they may be before or at the outset of your video call, could save you both an enormous amount of misdirected effort and the frustration of joint endeavour failing to progress.
footnote – previous blogs mentioning AIDA.