You Have an Industry Meeting Coming Up. How Should You Prepare?

A practical way to prepare for the people, the conversation, and what you need to learn

You have an industry meeting on your calendar.

What do you do next?

If you’re like many researchers, your first instinct may be to prepare what you want to say. You think about your research, decide which results to share, and perhaps start putting together slides.

That makes sense. You know your work, and you want to represent it well.

But preparing your content is only part of preparing for the conversation.

Before the meeting, take time to learn about the organization and the people you’ll be meeting with. Look at the company’s priorities and current work. Review the participants’ roles and professional backgrounds. Talk with colleagues or internal partners who may know the organization.

Then go one step further.

Ask yourself: What might these people care about? What might they need to understand? What do I need to learn from them?

Audience awareness is not guesswork. It is preparation.

1. Learn Who Will Be in the Room

Before deciding exactly what to say, learn who you’ll be talking with.

Start with some basic research. Look up the organization. Review the professional profiles of the people attending. Find out what you can about their roles, responsibilities, and areas of focus.

Then ask:

• Who will be in the meeting?
• What are their roles?
• Why might they be participating?
• What authority or influence might they have?
• What might a useful outcome look like for them?

Titles can give you clues, but don’t stop there.

An R&D leader, manufacturing engineer, corporate strategy executive, and technology scout may all be interested in the same research for very different reasons.

One may be evaluating technical feasibility. Another may be thinking about integration into an existing process. Another may be looking for capabilities that could address a problem the company hasn’t solved yet.

This is why thinking of an industry audience simply as “nontechnical” can lead you in the wrong direction.

They may be highly accomplished experts. They simply have different expertise, responsibilities, decision criteria, and measures of success.

As one of my industry collaborators once put it:

“They’re at the top of their game too.”

Your job isn’t to assume what they know or don’t know. It’s to prepare for the possibility that they are looking at your work through a different lens.

2. Consider What They May Care About

Researchers are trained to evaluate work through questions such as:

Is it novel? Is it rigorous? How does it work?

Those questions matter.

But someone from industry may also be considering:

How does this compare with current alternatives? What might it cost? What risks remain? How difficult would it be to integrate?

Neither perspective is more sophisticated than the other. They reflect different responsibilities.

Before your meeting, develop a few hypotheses about what may matter to the people you are meeting.

For example:

• What problems might they be trying to solve?
• What constraints could affect their decisions?
• What alternatives are available to them today?
• What would make your research relevant to their environment?
• What evidence might they need before deciding to explore further?

Notice the word hypotheses.

You are preparing to have a better conversation, not pretending you already understand someone else’s business.

3. Use More Than One Source of Audience Insight

You don’t have to figure this out alone.

Useful audience insight can come from several places.

Talk with people who know the ecosystem. Commercialization managers, corporate engagement staff, technology transfer professionals, and other connectors may know the organization or the people you are meeting.

Look for professional signals. LinkedIn profiles, organizational priorities, recent initiatives, technical focus areas, and previous collaborations can help you understand the context around the meeting.

Ask colleagues. Someone who has worked with a similar company, function, or stakeholder may be able to tell you what questions or priorities tend to surface.

And increasingly, you can use AI as a perspective tool.

Not to tell you what your audience definitely thinks. To help you consider possibilities you might otherwise overlook.

4. Use AI to Develop Audience Hypotheses

If you know who you are meeting with and why, AI can help you explore the conversation from their perspective.

Try a prompt like this:

Situation: I am a [your role] working in [research field]. I am preparing for a conversation about [topic] with [describe the people you will be meeting, including their roles and organization].

Help me prepare by identifying:

1. Three things this audience may care about most.
2. Questions they may ask about my work.
3. Factors that may influence how they evaluate its relevance.
4. Three questions I could ask to better understand their needs, priorities, or constraints.
5. Assumptions in this analysis that I should verify during the conversation.

Use only information that is appropriate to share with an external AI system and follow your organization’s AI policies.

Then apply your own judgment.

Ask yourself:

What confirms what I already expected?
What surprised me?
What seems irrelevant or off-base?

AI output is not audience intelligence. It is a source of hypotheses you can investigate.

Prepare with hypotheses. Enter the conversation with curiosity.

5. Decide How You Want to Communicate

Once you have a better sense of the audience and context, you can make better choices about what to say.

Two questions are particularly useful:

How much domain expertise does this audience have?

How much time and context do you have for the conversation?

Those answers can help you decide whether the situation calls for a Bottom-Line Snapshot, a Framed Explanation, an Expert Summary, or a Deep Dive.

The goal isn’t to strip technical detail out of your message.

It’s to choose the level of detail that fits the conversation.

If you’re unsure how to make that choice, use the Messaging Strategy Matrix in How Much Detail Should You Share?

6. Prepare for Interaction, Not Just Delivery

Researchers often prepare for meetings by thinking primarily about what they want to say.

Also prepare for what may happen next.

What questions are you likely to receive?

What concerns might be behind those questions?

Which answers should be incorporated into what you say upfront? Which should be ready for discussion? Which supporting data should you have available if someone wants to go deeper?

You won’t predict everything.

But anticipating the conversation can help you walk into the meeting much better prepared.

The Question Bank Worksheet can help you do that systematically.

7. Stay Curious Once the Meeting Starts

This may be the most important part.

You can research an organization. You can study the people attending. You can use AI to anticipate their priorities.

But there are limits to what you can know before the meeting.

The conversation is where you find out.

Researchers can easily enter an industry meeting in presentation mode:

Here is what I have. Let me explain why it matters.

That can unintentionally turn an exploratory conversation into a transaction:

Are you interested in this or not?

Instead, stay curious.

Ask questions.

You might ask:

• What challenge are you trying to solve?
• How are you addressing it today?
• What makes that difficult?
• What would a meaningful improvement look like?
• Where do current approaches fall short?
• What would you need to understand before exploring something like this further?

Then listen.

You may learn that the problem isn’t quite what you thought it was. You may discover a constraint you hadn’t considered. You may uncover an application for your work that wasn’t obvious beforehand.

And sometimes you may discover that there isn’t a fit.

That’s useful information too.

The purpose of an exploratory industry conversation isn’t to convince someone to want what you already have.

It’s to understand whether there is enough alignment to keep exploring.

A Better Goal for the Meeting

You don’t need to walk into an industry meeting knowing everything about the company.

And you don’t need to walk in ready to deliver the perfect pitch.

Prepare enough to understand the people and the context. Develop hypotheses about what may matter. Decide how you want to communicate. Anticipate likely questions.

Then stay curious enough to learn something you couldn’t have known beforehand.

That’s how an industry meeting becomes more than an opportunity to present your research.

It becomes an opportunity to discover what might be possible together.