Every meeting with a customer is a chance to grow that relationship. Don’t waste it! Here are five pre-meeting tips to help you show up feeling confident, prepared, and ready for success.
1) Create a meeting agenda.
Be honest: how many times have you left a meeting with a customer and realized you forgot to discuss a critical item? As in, “Oops, I totally forgot to let her know about our revised payment terms!” Don’t wing it. Prepare your own written checklist or a formal agenda to make sure you make the most of everyone’s time.
2) Power up your gadgets.
If you’re going to need any of your mobile devices during the meeting, don’t walk in with your battery in the red zone. Remember to bring power cords or charge boosters. And don’t rely on charging your device in a conference room. Your customer might want to shift the meeting location at the last minute.
3) Check any order history and customer service issues.
There’s nothing worse than walking into a meeting with a customer who’s steamed about some aspect of your product or service and has been looking forward to your meeting as an opportunity to unload a litany of complaints. Do you want to be helpful and responsive when a customer is unhappy? Of course. But you don’t want those issues to take the place of your meeting agenda.
Remember, sales opportunities are made—not born—in customer meetings.
Investigate any outstanding issues before the meeting. If you want to use some of your meeting time to address those issues, let the customer know you’re willing to discuss them. And, if that’s the case, come prepared with a list of ways you’re ready to support the customer to alleviate his or her concerns. Is this more work for you? Yes. Will this make you look good in the eyes of the customer? Absolutely. Even if your efforts don’t seem to be appreciated in the moment, at least it will clear some space and leave room for you to move the relationship forward at another time.
4) Find out what’s happening in that customer’s company and industry.
When salespeople go into a meeting, they’re normally very focused on themselves. As in, “I want this deal,” or, “I want this customer to buy more from us.” Guess what? The customer doesn’t care about your sales pipeline. The customer wants to know what value you’re bringing to the table. It can seem counterintuitive to set aside your own needs; but focusing on the customer actually puts you in a much stronger position.
Take some time before every customer meeting to research the customer and his or her company online. Find out what’s happening at the company (or business unit) and in their industry. You never know what you might uncover. Sometimes, it’s the little things. Maybe your customer celebrated a birthday over the weekend, and you never would have known if you hadn’t checked her Facebook and Twitter feeds. Other times, that research has bigger implications. Did one of their executives just get promoted? Was a new industry ruling just announced? Did they just lose one of their key customers to a competitor? Have they just launched a new product? Any one of these developments might represent a business opportunity for you.
5) Center yourself.
Most of us accumulate the weight of negative experiences as we go about our day. Maybe you got stuck in a bumper-to-bumper traffic on your way to meet this customer. Maybe you just read an email conveying bad news about a major deal you’ve been working on. Don’t carry your feelings about those experiences into the meeting. The customer will sense your energy and feel your presence as heavy and negative.
You should look at every meeting with a customer as a chance to create joy for that person. Before you walk into the meeting, center yourself. You can do this in very simple ways. Find a quiet space and close your eyes. Relax your stomach muscles and let your arms hang loosely at your sides. Roll your neck a few times if your shoulders feel tight. Inhale through your nose and fill your lungs to capacity. Then, release that air in a single breath. Repeat that three times.
If you’re feeling a bit off balance and nervous before the meeting, take two minutes to stand in the kind of “power pose” social psychologist Ann Cuddy described in her popular TED talk. Just stand with your feel shoulder width apart and place your hands on your hips, Superman/woman style. This stance raises our levels of testosterone (confidence hormones) and lowers levels of cortisol (stress hormones).
Business is about developing mutually beneficial relationships. If you put more positivity into your customer meetings, you’ll get more positive results out of them.
