Customer meetings require significant level of prior preparation and thoughtful engagement to achieve a desired outcome. Not every meeting achieves the level of success you wish of that meeting. One needs to do certain things before and during the meeting to achieve the objectives set for that meeting. Ravichander Rao
A B2B customer meeting differs significantly from B2C because of the number of decision makers involved, value of the deal and the level of engagement between two parties. The goal of a prospecting meeting is to:
a) Identify a problem
b) Validate the impact of problem and whether the customer is willing to make a change to fix the problem
c) Understand the way he would measure whether problem is fixed with the solution
If you open up the meeting to pitch all the good stuff your product has until your presentation is over or your customer nods his head or becomes completely silent, then it is not effective. You won't be able to understand the customer's problem by following this approach.Similarly, presenting contents full of solutions will equally turns off the customer. The solutions, relevant to one customer may or may not be applicable to another. Every customer always a variation of the problem that another customer faced, and the context around the problem makes it most of time unique. So, one must leave a significant portion of the time of the meeting to let the customer speak about this problem, situation and what he is trying to accomplish.
If you are meeting the customer for the first time, then it is quite difficult to structure what exactly you prepare for the meeting. However, some background research helps you to gauge roughly two or three big problems a customer would face under such a scenario. Use this to organize your meeting time. Roughly, 10% of time to talk about your company and its relevant offerings, 20% of time about the product you are presenting, 10% of time to talk about the typical problems that a customer in a similar situation faces and its implication, 30% of time for solutions that have be used by other customers and the benefits that the customers have realized, 30% of time for the customer to talk about his problems, situation, etc. A customer may still not open up about his problem, if you do not have enough credibility with his especially when you meet him for the first time. When this happens, accept the fact, stay calm and do not try to force the customer. Schedule another follow up meeting to build this relationship.
The most important question is to find what problem needs to solved. Typically, no customer will tell this to you upfront, unless you have been engaged with them for long enough and have high credibility. As you are in the path of building the credibility while trying to help to solve their problem, the way to ask this will be - structure the question by giving the current context which includes the current business environment and the phase in the discussion you are in with the customer, and ask a short question that tries to find what he is looking for in the offering that he believes will solve the problem. This allows customer time to think and provide a contextual response than a generic response. Since you may still not understand the problem and its impact completely, you should follow up with additional questions to understand the situation better and get a guidance on the impact.
Once the problem is established and well understood, try to understand whether he is interested to solve it and how urgently. A problem that is not urgent enough, will not lead to a product sale. It is also unproductive for you and your customer to spend time discussing about this. So, one should uncover whether there any other problems that are worth solving. If there is no problem, worth solving for, then take a pause and acknowledge that there may not be an urgency to solve a problem and whether you should share the solutions at this point or come back at a later time. On the other hand, if the problem is urgent enough, focus on the solutions that are relevant to the customer, and provide information on impact on different metrics - functional, economical and emotional collateral that customers can take away with them to consider further. These metrics should be explained from a perspective of the role they are playing in their organization. You cannot expect a purchaser to appreciate the metrics that are relevant for a process engineer. Your metrics may still not be relevant, however it does serve an anchor point for further discussions. Use this to find more information about, how the customer would like to evaluate a solution to determine whether it is meeting his requirements or not.
Once this information is available, go back and structure you offering so that it meets the customer's requirements and have follow up the configuration you have put together and use the meeting to refine the configuration.
