• Prep
  • Identify OWNER for the meeting who will Project Manage, orchestrate, lead, be responsible for logistics, rallying the team together, shaping agenda, etc.
  • Identify Point of Contact e.g. from Presales team (if available) to help orchestrate content from the pursuit team and help compile PowerPoint, Case Studies, Agenda, etc. Otherwise owner of the meeting needs to orchestrate.
  • Research customer attendees to understand their backgrounds, responsibilities, etc. ahead of the meeting
  • Identify pursuit team (who will be face-to-face and remote)
  • Start working on agenda
  • Assign each agenda topic to an owner
  • Bring only people who will have talking, real parts during face-to-face (don’t bring a “kitchen sink”, keep it small)
  • Prep Questions, prioritize and categorize Q’s
  • Prep PowerPoint with Message, Value Proposition, Why We are the Right Partner of Choice, Case Studies
  • Schedule to have a few prep sessions before the event with a customer to get overview, grounding, problem statement
  • Ask Customer to share any materials ahead of time so we can prepare
  • Meet with Business Users and also Tech/Arch teams to understand current Business and Tech landscape
  • Schedule daily internal sync to preperare well ahead of time so it’s not the last minute rush to compile materials and organizing people
• Logistics
  • Start OneNote Page to capture notes
  • Start Dropbox to share materials
  • Night or day before the meeting, have lunch/dinner or meeting with internal team to do final preparations, align on topics. At the very least, do it with the internal team a few hours before on the day of the meeting, presentation
  • Share Logistics (e.g Calendar invites, Address, parking, any registration requirements with front desk/security, reminders (bring driver license for security), etc. with participants)
  • Setup GoToMeeting
  • Come to the customer meeting early e.g. 30 mins to check-in, find room, setup equipment, dial-in, WebEx, etc.
  • Record the meeting (if possible)
• Agenda
  • See Sample Agenda below
• During Workshop
  • Try to Record (if possible)
  • Dial-In remote team and use Screen Share
  • Re-arrange tables so people are facing each other, don’t be shy to re-arrange seating in the room (especially for the workshop)
  • Mingle your team with customer’s and spread out so it’s not one side vs each other, sit side by side with the customer
  • Stand up, use whiteboard, move around, people need to huddle, post posted notes
    • e.g. we did a Customer Workshop and CIO came in the room and the room was bustling with energy, activity, excitement
  • Have side conversations during breaks
  • Build rapport, relationships
• After Workshop
  • Summarize and share Notes, Action Items
  • Proposal – work on the proposal, SOW
  • Assessment, Discovery, POC, MVP, Sprint 0, etc. – start with something as a follow up
  • Or maybe propose more in-depth discoveries/assessments to go deeper into specific topics
• Sample Agenda
  • Vision, Goals
  • Roadmap – where are you heading
  • Business Problem Statement, Pain points
    • Why?
    • What is the problem?
    • What is the Ask? Need to understand.
    • Need to understand the problem statement
    • Let’s list and prioritize w/ Customer team
  • Needs
    • What are you current needs?
    • What are you solving for?
  • Outcomes
    • e.g. how will you measure success, how does success look like, etc.
  • Scope
    • e.g. identify the scope, don’t boil the ocean, prioritize the top ones
  • Use Cases
    • Identify use cases
  • Current State
    • Current State today
  • Future State
  • Technical Topics to cover – example:
    • Web, Mobile track
    • End to End Use case
    • Cross-geo, international efforts
  • Approach
    • How would be approach tackling the problem, e.g. Step 1, Step 2, Step 3
  • Timeline, Dates
  • Engagement,
    • How do we start engaging?
    • Ways of Working Together
    • Drive towards Assessment, Discovery, Workshop, POC, etc.
  • Next Steps
    • Make Plan Actionable to Implement (as a table, summary, e.g. what are we doing on Monday)

When considering discounts, have some P&L analysis done in preparation for approval meeting with your management:

• What is the current P&L on the account?
• What is P&L on the proposed project that we are trying to discount?
• What would P&L be for a proposed project after applying discount?
• What would be Account P&L be considering existing Account Projects and Proposed Project discount?

• Figure out, focus how to do or achieve 10X growth, results, results for yourself, results for the company, results for your customer
• Look to achieve logarithmic/exponential progression growth, “hockey stick” growth NOT just incremental e.g. 25% improvement
• Look at the problem from other viewpoints, other angles to solve the problem, don’t look for incremental improvements, look for exponential improvements
• Question, challenge how to achieve these results in shorter periods of time. If someone says it’s a 10 year goal, question why can’t it be done in shorter period of time e.g. 6 mo – Peter Thiel
• Focus on hacking, tweaking, bootstrapping, being scrappy, innovative, collaborative, being entrepreneurial, etc. to achieve it
• Step outside of yourself, evaluate, see what you can do BIG, 10X
• Make Goals Interesting!
• “If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.” – Larry Page
• Focus on things that will drive those types outcomes, e.g. focus 20% of your effort that will produce 80% of your results, put the rest of “noise” on cruise control or ignore
• Prioritize appropriately, allocated % of time appropriately

Kanbanize – Dealing with Large Volume of Items, Tasks

Here is what works for me to get a meeting. I call it “Guerrilla Marketing” technique, in essence, Just Do It.

Email a person (better yet, call a person) but instead of asking for the time/date and doing the endless email exchange on availability, just politely note in your email that you will be suggesting a calendar invite with a proposed date/time.

Then, send a Calendar invite. It’s easier for a person to mentally accept / deny a meeting based on already proposed slot than to think about their availability. Also it’s easier for them to “Propose New Time” in Outlook or their calendaring system.

If the person doesn’t show up, politely email something to the fact that “I’m sorry I missed you on this call and I’ll suggest another time, please stay tuned. Or if there is someone else I should ping to schedule it, let me know.”

For important sales prospect meetings, leads, etc. it was taking me ~3 times of being “stood up” on the call and repeating the process above again and again until they show up.