Plan your business meeting

When you want to have a successful career in closing good business deals you need to prepare yourself for a very tough arena...

A very important asset will be for you to know very well how to prepare a business meeting. The first thing you should do is to search as many information as you can about your meeting parties.

Having the information, the first thing you should do is to propose the date for the meeting along with the place you suggest (as you can see, you will need a very good experience in places or at least a good database with restaurants, pubs); the date and the place must fit the taste of every party involved for the meeting.

Before the meeting
* make sure that all administrative tasks are assigned (travel tickets, hotel rooms, projectors, etc)
* find who are the players on the market
* find what's hot from the industry
* find a particular subject for each participants to leave a nice impression (e.g. "I heard that Giants made a great game last week")

The meeting request must contain
* the date and the location
* the starting time AND the ending time
* all parties involved
* very important: the meeting agenda (or meeting goals)

The meeting must be followed by a message to all participants; usually the follow-up is sent by the meeting initiator. The follow-up message:
* must be sent to all participants
* must be short and clear
* very important - must contain the conclusions and next steps


Other recommendations
* the place must be a "low-noise" one
* if possible, pay a visit to the place before the meeting in case that you don't know the place (it will help you when you ask for reservations also)
* confirm the reservations on the meeting day
* make sure that the meeting will have refreshments (water, coffee, snacks, etc)
* try to set a reason for each participant to make a follow-up (e.g. "Do you know a good restaurant in San Francisco?"); everyone will be pleased to help ;)
* be sure that you dress appropriately and you have a day perfume (sometimes makes the difference)

Of course that we can talk for days but I wanted to share with you something from my experience. What else that can be shared made you successful in a meeting?

Symantec to acquire PC Tools

Symantec announced today it signed an agreement to buy PC Tools. The financial detail has not disclosed but anyone from the software industry can figure out that the numbers are very, very big (PC Tools being one of the biggest computer security company).

Thus, Symantec is starting to be one of the most appealing company these days ...

Dell is using Avangate

This morning I performed a search on Google using "avangate" and I was surprised to see that this time a Dell company (License Technologies Group) is using our brand to promote itself.

The frequency of these kind of situations is very high lately and my question to these "competitors" is who should buy the beer for the marketing people?

Google released "Insights for Search"

A few days ago, Google released a new tool for anyone involved in the online business. The service seems to be an extension of Google Trends and it's giving a deep analyze of searched keywords over the Internet: analyze multiple keywords, regional interest, worldwide interest map, etc.

So, enjoy Google Insights for Search.

Avangate is blogging!

I am happy to share with you that Avangate has finally an official blog: http://blog.avangate.com/

Accordingly to Adriana, the blog will contain articles about software business, affiliate marketing, software marketing, software events, etc. Also, the latest news about Avangate will be published (in a 2.0 manner of course). The blog authors will be from inside Avangate team and also some special guests from the software industry.