Business Meetings and How To Prep For Them Appropriately

Business moves quite quickly and a poor pitch can lose a potential client permanently. The best thing that a person in sales can do is to prepare for business meetings as intensely as possible. This preparation will allow the person to imagine all questions that are being asked in order to answer them correctly. With this being said the person doing sales needs to know the product/service inside and out in order to be as effective at selling as possible. The following are tips to help prep for business meetings appropriately so sales are not lost due to a controllable variable.

Use A Client Coming To You To Your Advantage

A client coming to the office can definitely play to your advantage. The most important thing is to make the office look presentable as well as try to impress a client. If the client is in interior design then having vintage rugs will allow you to establish some kind of rapport before the pitch even starts. Do not have messy office and play to the client’s interests whether it is a poster or something like the rug mentioned above. Building a small personal relationship will make the client want to do business with you as most people want to work with people that they like personally. Staff should be dressed up and even offering to take them to lunch with a few people they will be working with directly can help immensely. Putting a name to a face can make a client more understand if a certain individual has made a mistake.

Use a Questionnaire To Find Pain Points

Whether it is a call with a client or a face to face meeting it is important to not go off of subject too far. A questionnaire for clients can qualify the client if their budget is enough or disqualify them. The sales team does not want to waste time with clients that cannot meet minimum spend or budget for a project or product. Pain points will allow the salesperson to shape their pitch to customize it to the client. Most of the time people do not want to feel like they are being sold something but rather like they are making the decision to buy something. Talking about a product that a client does not need as it is part of the regular pitch can have quite negative consequences.

Long Term Contracts Can Be Discounted

Large corporations are built out of clients coming back year after year on long term contracts. With this being said getting a client to sign one of these depends on the relationship built as well as the past record of work done. If high quality of work is done then it should be easy to sign a company to a longer contract. In instances where a company has failed or not lived up to expectations then these contracts can be discounted. All businesses know their margins so discounting this considering the factors of how easy it is to work with business should all be take into account. All clients want to feel like they are getting a great deal so do not deprive them of this feeling.

Setting up the perfect business meeting can help increase conversions of solid leads to sales. Do not allow a lack of preparation to impact sales at all. Prep for the sale then close it!

Melissa Thompson
Melissa Thompson writes about a wide range of topics, revealing interesting things we didn't know before. She is a freelance USA Today producer, and a Technorati contributor.