What Does it Mean to Prepare for a Sales Meeting?
Before reading this you may be interested to read my previous posting No Time to Rehearse? You’re Fired!
At many professional firms, preparing for a sales meeting means many hours spent preparing a PowerPoint presentation deck that will double as a leave-behind. This document and maybe a proposal, too, have been through several iterations, proofed and reproofed, adjusted, adapted and then admired by the sales team who may or may not remember to thank the graphics specialist who stayed up all night incorporating last minute changes.
With document in hand and confidence buoyed, the sales team grabs a cab to take them to the client’s office. During the fifteen minute ride they decide what they will say and who will say it.
This is insane.
Long ago I was put in charge of a struggling office that was losing pitch after pitch. To turn the situation around, I did post mortem interviews with as many people who had hired other firms as I could. I used a process for the interview that avoided biasing the clients’ responses (see Chapter 24 in the second edition of my book, Rain Making: How to Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field for a detailed description of the process.). I must have done twenty such interviews over several months, sometimes with separate members of the client’s selection committee.
I first asked the client why she had chosen the other firm, letting her prioritize her reasons without any suggestions from me. I then asked what our competitor had done well, what we had done well and not so well, again without offering any suggestions.
Once I had her view of the decision, I asked her to compare what we did with what the competitor did, starting from first contact. One issue at a time I asked how each firm handled the initial phone inquiry from the client, how each handled the fact finding meeting, the proposal, the pitch meeting, the leave-behind document, and follow up.
Not once was the proposal or leave-behind mentioned by any of the clients until I brought it up. Not once! When I did bring them up, it was clear the clients didn’t remember them very well, if at all. I suspect that many of them never so much as glanced at the leave-behind. The deck or pitch book were mentioned by two or three clients, all referring to one image, a particularly compelling diagram our competitor had concocted.
What they did remember and what all of them volunteered without prompting was how our people and our competitors had handled themselves in face-to-face interactions with their people. This they could talk about in detail and with emotion. This is what they cared about!
Like so many other firms we had been putting all our energies into things that mattered little and treating cavalierly that which really counted. It was insane!
And when we fixed it by taking rehearsals seriously—putting in time and effort where it mattered—we began to win again.
For more advice like this, please see Ford Hardings’ new book: Rain Making, Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, 2nd Edition
“Rain Making, in its new edition demonstrates its position as the single most sensible, accessible guide to building a professional practice…”
David Maister, author of Strategy and the Fat Smoker and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with Charles Green and Robert Galford)