Closing Critical Deals - 10 Common Meeting Challenges

Closing Critical Deals – 10 Common Meeting Challenges

by Lois Wong

 

 

In the 1990’s it was my privilege to facilitate more than 1,000 executive meetings at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, with luminaries like Google’s Eric Schmidt (then Novell CEO), Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, Board Member Vernon Jordan, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, DARPA NIST Director Arati Prabhakar, and dozens of other company executives, even Hollywood legend William Shatner, and national cartoonist Garry Trudeau, of Doonesbury’s.

 

While these were important events for Xerox, none of them were more important than our customer sales meetings (multi-million dollar opportunities). For these meetings, we carefully planned "glimpses into the future”, with a goal of fostering deeper relationships and establishing credibility to further company business. Many hours of thought and planning go into preparing for these, including planning of the meeting agenda. 

 

Have you ever encountered any of the 10 Common Meeting Challenges?

 

1. The Decision Maker leaves early
2. The sales presentation takes longer than planned
3. “Surprise” customer attendees show up
4. Customers leave in the middle of the presentation
5. Customers show up late for the presentation
6. There are no questions from customers
7. Someone from your team takes the discussion off point
8. No technical expert is present to discuss details
9. A team member is more engaged with his blackberry than the meeting
10. The Decision Maker takes a humanities break during a key portion of the presentation

 

There are numerous ways to avoid these challenges. While there are no silver bullets, being proactive will reduce the chances that these challenges happen to you.

 

Here are the 10 Things to Consider When Setting up a Meeting.

 

1. Set mutual meeting goals and expectations in advance
2. Agree upon meeting start and stop times
3. Establish and communicate presentation with Q&A timeframes
4. Communicate with customers in advance to confirm attendee names, titles, and topics
5. Select relevant topics and minimize technical jargon
6. Send out a map along with an agenda that includes attendee names
7. Provide and discuss agenda with team members in advance
8. Prepare to have technical people attend or available by phone
9. Assign team members roles including summarizing action items
10. Designate explicit breaks

 

Thomas A. Kayser, author of Mining Group Gold, recommends starting every meeting with a mutually agreed upon statement of purpose. While this might seem like a trivial and somewhat obvious point, the majority of meetings start and finish without one. As a result: time is wasted, meetings are unproductive, sales cycles are elongated and everyone is frustrated.

 

A little preparation goes a long way. Good luck with your next sales meeting!