Lesson 27 - Prepare for an upcoming Meeting

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Preparation is key to successful sales meetings. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to research and prepare effectively for your upcoming meetings with prospects. Your assignment will involve creating a pre-meeting preparation checklist for one of your upcoming calls.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to prepare for an upcoming meeting with a prospect. Now, the amount of time that you get in front of a prospect is so rare and so valuable. Every minute that you spend in front of one of your prospects is an opportunity to grow your relationship, to build trust, to create and develop and further your opportunities with them. So you really want to make sure that you're making the most of every single minute. The best way to do that is to prepare for a meeting before you get there. You don't want to waste any time once you're on the call. Now, the first way that you can prepare for an upcoming meeting is to know who's going to be on it. So before you jump on, make sure that you're looking at the invite. Look up all of the people that have been invited on their side. You want to find them. Find them on LinkedIn, find their titles, find their their goals, understand what you know about them. Write down what do you think each of those individuals is looking to get out of the call. Why are they there? Right then you want to write down everyone that's going to be there on your side, and understand what your roles are. Maybe your CSM is joining your solution, engineer, your manager, your SDR or OBR. You want to make sure that you are that you're writing down all of the roles on both sides, what they're there to do, what they're there to get out of it, or at least your best guess. Once you have an understanding of that, it's time to write down what we call the pow, the purpose agenda and outcome. The purpose agenda and outcome of the call. The purpose of the call is pretty straightforward. Why are you even having it? The agenda of the call should be clear and state the amount of time that you plan to spend on each area. And the outcome of the call should be what you're hoping to get once that call is through, what are you looking to walk away from the call with? So let's put this into some examples. When you think about your first call, and I should preface this, every sale is different, every product is different, but normally your first call, you're going to be doing some basic discovery, right? So your first call the purpose. Purpose might be to introduce your solution briefly and then work to understand the prospects, current challenges. Your agenda for a 30 minute meeting. It might be introductions for five minutes, overview of your product or solution for 10 minutes, overview of the prospects, current challenges, or discussion of the prospects current challenges for 10 minutes and a Q and A for five minutes. That's a quick 30 minute call, and it's going to go by like this. So the longer you can get, obviously, the better. If it's your second meeting with them. Oh, and when you think about your outcome, right, your outcome of a first call would most likely be a list of pain points and potentially a referral to other relevant stakeholders. So you might say, you know, for this call to be successful, the outcome is, I will leave with an understanding of their current pain points, negative consequences, impact of these challenges, etc. Your second call might be detailed product demo, and maybe this is a 45 minute call, so the purpose would be to dive deeper into how your solution aligns with their challenges through a detailed product demonstration. The agenda might be introductions for five minutes, alignment on current pain points for five minutes, demonstration of solution for 25 minutes, Q and A for 10 minutes. The outcome of that call. When you think about your demo, you really want to be thinking about like, how am I going to get to the evaluation criteria from here? So it may be a referral to the economic buyer. It might be a meeting set with the decision steering committee. Essentially, once you've proven your solution out, you're hoping that that will earn you the right to talk to the person in charge, basically, and then your third meeting, your purpose might be to finalize the details, to discuss pricing and to outline any remaining steps towards closing the deal. So for a 30 minute call, the agenda might look like welcome and introductions for five minutes, review of proposed solution for five minutes, pricing and contract terms for five minutes, alignment and contract finalization for 10 outline of next steps through the remainder of the sale for five right? So thinking about that evaluation criteria, the outcome of that call might be a. What we call a mutual action plan. So you might leave that call with a mutual action plan that's going to take you through the remainder of the evaluation, the paper process, the decision process, and ultimately the sale have i oversimplified the hell out of this? Yes, of course I have. But what I'm really wanting you to take away is not what every step of the sales process is what I want you to take away is that every call should have a purpose, an agenda and an outcome. Why are you there? What are you going to do and what are you looking to walk away with? If you can nail down those three things, you are in an excellent spot. You also before you enter that call, before you go to the call, you need to have a pre call meeting with everyone internal that's going to be on that call. So like I said earlier, if your CSM is joining your SDR or OBR, your solution engineer, make sure that you are discussing beforehand what your roles are, who's going to take the lead, who's going to demo the software, who's going to ask the questions, who's going to answer the technical questions. How are you going to handle potential objections, and who's going to take the lead on that? What do you expect to come up? Right? You want to coordinate so that you can show professionalism and a united front. And once your team is aligned, you also need to align with the prospects team. Don't just go into the call with your own plan on how it's going to work. You need to align with them too. So you should be reaching out with an email to set the purpose agenda and outcome of the call, and the email might say, you know, subject line, upcoming discussion aligning our goals for success. Hi, Dimitri. I hope this message finds you well. We're looking forward to our upcoming discussion on November 13, to make the most of our time, I've outlined our agenda for the call. Introduction, solution, overview, your challenges, Q and A, you would give little descriptions of each of those. Our primary goal for this call is to better understand your needs and discuss how we can best support your team. Please let me know if there are any other topics you'd like us to prepare, or if the proposed agenda doesn't align with your expectations. We want to ensure this conversation is productive as possible, looking forward to our discussion, Nick, once you've aligned both internally and with the prospect now you are completely ready to have a productive, valuable discussion that meets both their needs and yours. All right, it's your turn choose an upcoming customer meeting. If you don't have an upcoming customer meeting, hold on this assignment. You can move to the next lesson. That's totally fine. I don't want you to just make up a meeting. I want you to wait until you have a meeting coming up, and I want you to prepare by listing the stakeholders, the attendees, on both sides, the customer side and yours. Define the purpose of the call, write out your agenda, list your intended outcome, align with your team, schedule a pre call, a pre call with your internal team, and communicate with your prospect to align on their side. You're going to find detailed guidance for this in your study guide, and you can always ask your mentor, manager, new hire buddy, for advice, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.