If you ask any business professional what they dread on their calendar the most, many of them would tell you the same thing: all of those pointless meetings. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t been pulled away from their desk at the most inopportune time, only to sit in a room and hear people convey information that they either already knew or that they didn’t need to know in the first place.

The dirty little secret here is that there are NO pointless meetings in the world of business – only wasted opportunities to get things done. If you want to make sure your meetings are justifying their existence, you’ll want to keep a few key things in mind.

Know When to Schedule a Meeting and When Not To

The first step on your road to a more productive meeting schedule involves coming to an understanding of what type of information should be conveyed in a meeting and what would be better left for some other delivery mechanism. One of the reasons why meetings tend to fall into the "pointless" category for many people is that they don’t require input or collaboration. If a team leader wants to draw everyone together to talk about updates to a project, but they don’t want the advice of anyone else, what they’re scheduling is not a meeting at all. It is an email at best.

Collaboration and the input of everyone involved should be a requirement for any meeting to justify its existence. If a particular problem has cropped up with a project and everyone needs to come together to solve it, that’s one thing. However, if the purpose of the meeting can be accomplished by just sending a memo or some other form of communication, don’t waste everyone’s time by gathering the entire team together to talk about the work they are already doing. Instead, let the team just get on with doing their jobs.

It’s All About Solutions and Focus

Another one of the reasons why more meetings tend to be less than productive is because people come with ideas, not solutions. One sure-fire way to make sure that nothing gets done is to allow people to come to a meeting and say off the top of their heads whatever is on their minds, firing off ideas that may or may not work.

In a perfect world, everyone at the meeting would know that you have a problem and would come prepared with X, Y, and Z suggestions for how to feasibly solve it. You wouldn’t waste the meeting time searching for an answer to your problem. Instead, you would be able to pick the best solution available to you from what the team members came prepared with and brought to the meeting. Far too many meetings lack this type of targeted focus, which is why so many of us can walk out of a meeting and feel like it accomplished nothing.

Bottom line, there are no pointless meetings in the world of business or, at least, there shouldn’t be. Getting everyone together for a meeting can be a great thing. Everyone is in a room together, feeding off of everyone else’s energy and building a solid foundation of creativity that will carry your business forward. Meetings that are little more than lectures have no place in a productive organization. If you want to have a meeting, by all means, do so – just make sure it has a clear focus before you schedule it.

Any marketer worth anything will tell you that the key to increasing sales is to use A/B testing to determine which sales tactic is more successful than another. If you’re not familiar with it, A/B testing is comparing two versions of something to see which one performs better. With that in mind, have you ever wondered why some tactics are more successful than others?

Logically, we think that if we appeal to the rational brain, we will convince people that our product is the best possible product for their needs. However, if that were the case, would anyone ever buy a Pet Rock? Nope.

Unless you’re selling to Mr. Spock, there’s a much simpler way of convincing people to buy what you’re selling. The key to turning prospects into clients is tapping into the deeply embedded emotions inside each one of them.

By identifying these emotions and learning how to trigger them, you can increase your revenue faster than you can say "Chia Pet." Here are the top 5 psychological triggers you can start using immediately to boost your bottom line.

1. Increasing Pleasure and Avoiding Pain

Avoiding pain and increasing pleasure are the driving forces of all human activity. This idea is the most fundamental reason we have a nervous system. If something hurts, we find a way to stop it. If something feels pleasurable, we do it more.

Translating this into your marketing strategy, you must first identify what your clients associate with pain and pleasure. Once you’ve figured that out, the rest is easy. Draft your marketing message in a way that shows your customers how your product or service will get them as close as possible to their pleasure trigger and away from their pain trigger.

2. Simplifying Life

For most of us, life is complicated. Too complicated. It takes 47 steps to get us from the comfort of our beds and out the door prepared to work. We don’t need another product or service that will add more steps (obstacles) to our day.

Take a good, hard look at what you’re selling. Does it add or remove barriers from people’s lives? If it’s not easy and fast to use, consider making a few tweaks that will take all of the "no’s" out of the equation.

3. Creating Novelty

New and shiny are what we love. In fact, it has been scientifically shown that exposure to something novel increases the amount of dopamine in the brain, that chemical that makes us all tingly and excited.

If you’ve ever heard someone complaining about the lack of significant changes in the latest iPhone, but still stand in line for hours to get one in their hot, little hands on release day, you’ve witnessed the power of novelty.

You can easily create innovation with your products by making a few simple changes and give your prospects that shot of dopamine they’ve been craving. Think googly-eyes on the pet rock.

4. Telling a Story

Humans have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years by telling stories. It’s how we share our experiences. The best storytellers invoke all of the senses to put their audience directly into the action.

You can infuse even the most mundane products with the magic of a good story. Try updating your copy to tell a story about your product that transports your prospects to a happier, more memorable place. They’ll buy just to keep the story alive.

5. Building Anticipation

We’ve all turned 16 at some point in our lives. Remember the anticipation we felt as the day drew nearer and the prospect of being able to drive around without an adult sat winking at us in the distance? It made life a little more sparkly, didn’t it?

If you’ve got a new product or service in the works, don’t just plunk it down on the counter when it’s all done. Start building some buzz while you’re still working on it. Send out emails to your current customers and prospects. Create a series of videos giving out little bits of information at a time. Get people in that "I can’t wait" mode and your launch day will be more profitable than you can imagine.