The meeting

Congratulations!

You booked your first meeting.

So today is the day your going to meet your potential costumer and hopefully make a good argument for your product / service.

What you do and say has more importance than if the stuff you sell are good or crap.

So first of:

1. Be prepared, read up on the company you are to visit (homepage, news, articles products any and everything you can get your eyes on.)
2. You are a welcome person act like it. (you would not have a meeting otherwise).
3. You are expected so be on time or at the most 5 minutes early.
4. When booking you should have made it clear that the meeting should take somewhere up to 60 minutes.
5. Dress accordingly
6. No matter what be polite (even if they are far from it)
7. End the meeting with a thank you for the business or as you will make business in the future

 

So first thing first. After greetings you should preferably let the customer talk and show you around his or hers company.

They are proud to show you around and you should take mental notes of what they do and how they do it since you will be using this in the sales pitch later in the meeting.

Sometimes however they do not wish to show you around or talk about their company first but will more or less force you to pitch first since this will give them a good advantage when negotiating later.

Try as best as you can to avoid this. If they don’t want to talk about their company go for the personal approach and try to find at least some common ground to stand on. You will get a (hopefully) picture about the other person by the pictures and things they have in their office hook on to some of these to make a topic to talk about. You have 60 min and the actual pitch will usually only take 5 – 10 min and the rest is the parley that you are doing now.

Big company s may stop you even here and send you and their buyer to a neutral meeting room to give you as little leverage as possible. Then you will just try to do the best of it if you can’t or they wont talk anything else than business do that but at every opportunity try to find out how they do things and what use they could have from your product /service.

You will most likely be nervous when doing this for the first time it will show so if its to oblivious then tell the customer that this is in fact your first meeting but that you have worked in this field / you are confident in you product etc. This can create rapport so that he /she feels sympathy for you, makes them go easier and help you land the deal.

They are also humans!

Ok more on this in the next post.