How to approach an initial sales meeting
I wanted to write this post to follow up a previous one which covered the importance of having an effective sales process. The post began with a comment that entrepreneurs have a fantastic passion for their products and are able to convey this deep enthusiasm in sales pitches.
The risk is that this can lead to relying upon a solution-centric approach which takes no heed of the prospect’s challenges. Founding CEOs frequently turn up at a sales meeting and wax lyrical about the features, capabilities and benefits of their solution. But how can you presume the solution will solve the prospect’s problem, without understanding what that problem is in detail? Getting this right is especially important at the early stages of your company’s life, as feedback from these early sales meetings can be vital to helping you refine product / market fit in the wider sense.
A meeting (or meeting preparation) should always begin with a focus on identifying the prospect’s key challenges. In addition to taking this approach for our clients, we also use it with our own prospects. I thought I would lay out the high-level methodology I employ when meeting potential future clients, because although we are selling services, the same approach should be used as part of a consultative sales process for an enterprise technology solution.
Set a clear objective
E.g. ‘To understand the {prospect’s} key growth objectives, strategies and the accompanying challenges. From this, to determine whether our capabilities and experience could be utilised to help address these challenges and as such accelerate the growth of the business’
Understand their challenges (to determine whether they can be addressed by your competencies / capabilities)
- Elucidate these through a series of insightful questions. This serves a number of purposes beyond identifying their challenges:
- By asking the right questions, you demonstrate your expertise
- It gives a chance for you to highlight issues / opportunities which the prospect may not have been aware of
- It shows you have done your homework on their company, demonstrating that winning their business is of value to you
- For example, I often try to drill down to the crux of a prospect’s challenges by structuring questions under the following headings:
- Market and competitive landscape
- Growth objectives / window of opportunity
- Market focus and rationale
- Market strategy and proposition
- Demand generation activities
- Sales and sales management processes
- Partnering capabilities
- Explore potential synergies / areas of collaboration
- Give a relevant (according to the answers to the questions) background to your company / solution
- Discuss how a relevant selection of your competencies / capabilities could be used to address their most strategic challenges (elucidated earlier on)
- Add credence to the discussion by referring to appropriate case studies
Next steps (if appropriate)
- Agree to structure the discussions into an objective driven programme of work
- If well put together, this document will in itself give you significant credibility, as well as laying out the value the prospect will gain from the collaboration
- Suggesting to put together this programme of work should be compelling for the prospect – they should get value from it even if they end up not choosing you to execute upon it
If you are thoughtful, effective and easy to work with during the sales process, you give direct assurance to the prospect that this will be the case after the sale. As well as using what you learn to tailor the relevance of your offering to the company in question, it also helps you develop your overall proposition and further refine your product / market fit.
