It never hurts to listen
Walking into a pre-sales meeting armed with a complete and comprehensive power point presentation can be dangerous. Not dangerous as in something to fear. But dangerous in the sense of missing something important – such as an opportunity to provide an important client with something they need.
Marketing is no longer about persuading your prospect to see things your way. Modern business communication is just too advanced for that. Try it, and your audience will almost certainly get restless, if not outright hostile. Dangerous. Something more open-ended and interactive is needed so your prospect becomes an active and more engaged part of the process.
Techie trickery - or not…
I recently made a presentation to give some feedback on a project we’d run with a major client. Unfortunately, we had some technical difficulties – not uncommon when I’m involved. To cut a long story short, I couldn’t access the slideshow I’d put together.
Rather than shout, ‘Look, a baby wolf!’ and run out of the room, my colleague and I sat down and began asking our clients questions. We knew what we wanted to talk about, but by asking questions, we quickly found out what they wanted to talk about. And we had the responses to hand without needing a single bullet point.
Your client will always get the point - if they made it themselves
When we did finally hook up the laptop, we’d already covered most of the points - or our client had covered them for us. As a result, we raced through the slides while everyone in the room nodded their heads in agreement. How could they do otherwise? They’d made most of the points themselves. And there they were, on the screen, as if by magic. It was clear that everyone was onboard: when we all walked out of the meeting together, we were still talking.
In fact, the conversation made it through reception and into the kitchen. The result? Two further meetings have been scheduled already - one of them with top management. It would seem that the ‘Best parties end up in the kitchen’ rule could also apply to business meetings.
While a loose, informal approach may not be appropriate in all business meeting scenarios, when it comes to finding out what your clients need, it never hurts to listen.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
This is a nice story - and is a real-life illustration of two things.
One. Driven by the interactive elements of the web, marketing is becoming more and more about dialogue and less about shouting your message in people’s faces. Businesses are beginning to open up to input and comments from consumers - and asking consumers questions is a key way of achieving that.
Two. Thankfully, people are finally shifting away from PPT. Don’t get me wrong, I think PPT is one of the best visual aids the business community has; but for too long now people have used it as a crutch to carry them through meetings and presentations as opposed to using it as a great visual support at a few key moments. I recently saw an online preview of a two-day marketing course. Done as a series of Burns effect pictures and text, it ended with the words ‘And I promise, there will be no powerpoint’. That phrase alone sold it to me.