How to Prepare for a Successful First Meeting with a Prospective Client

Maximize your chances of securing a second meeting by mastering the art of the first encounter with a prospective client.

You will only have one first meeting with a prospective client. Because this is true, you need to make the most of this opportunity to position yourself as best prepared to help your contact make a change in their business. This first meeting is an audition. If you pass the audition, you will leave the meeting with a second meeting. Should you knock it out of the park, you will find a number of contacts joining you as you create value for your contacts. Let’s make certain you are prepared to succeed in being the last salesperson they will interview.

Effective Contact Research Strategies

In a sales conversation with two contacts, someone tried to tell me their roles. I opened up my file and showed them that I had researched them before the meeting. I took this information from their website and printed it so I would have it next to me during the meeting. While the information was helpful, I turned to LinkedIn to look at my two contacts’ work history. I added these to my file after reading what they shared on the best platform available for salespeople.

There was a time when it made sense to ask the client about how long they have worked for their company and what they did before joining their firm. But when the information is easily found with a few clicks, your contact is likely to believe you were too lazy to research them before a first meeting.

Comprehensive Company Research Techniques

Your company has a website that describes what they do and who they help. You may also find some of the companies they work with now or have worked with in the past. Depending on the company, you may be able to learn what makes them different from their competitors. The more you research the company, the better you are prepared for a first meeting. Instead of asking about things you can find on the internet, you can make a list of questions you will ask the client to get a better understanding of something you found on their website.

If you only did this work, you would still be missing important information that might help you. Whether you spend time researching the company’s competitors on Google or using a prompt that will allow you to compare your prospective client with their competitors, you will gain valuable insights. You don’t have to mention their competitors in the first meeting, but by doing this work, you will know things other salespeople will not know.

Identifying Your Client’s Pain Points

I worry about salespeople who ask a question to elicit the client’s problem. There are better sales strategies for honing in on their problem or some challenge they are experiencing now. You can use Google or AI to identify the headwinds that may be responsible for their problems or contribute to their poor results.

But there are other ways to know about the company’s problems. If your company has already won clients in the same industry, you can use your CRM to identify the problems they had before they engaged with the salesperson who helped them to turn things around. This type of research is often neglected, even though it can improve your performance in front of your contacts in a first meeting.

Essential Pre-Meeting Preparation

Having done the research in the categories above, you have done the work to be a better salesperson than your competitors. But having done this work, you are able to make a list of questions you will need to ask your contacts. Your questions are likely to be better because you did the reading and the researching of your contacts, their company, and their problems before the first meeting.

You will be measured by the value of the questions you ask in a first meeting. The better the questions, the more likely you are to command a second meeting.

Delivering Value to Your Client

When we talk about creating value in the sales conversation, we are describing the information and insights we share with our contacts to help them understand and solve their problem and enable the decisions they will need to make to improve their results. Before you engage with your contacts, your research can help you prepare to share what your contacts need to learn or understand.

We call this being One-Up, which means one has the knowledge and experience to know what their contacts need to know to succeed in a change initiative that will improve their decision-making and the better results that they needed when they accepted your request for a first meeting.

Before leaving this article, make a list of sources you have available to do world-class research. In the information age, it has never been easier to find the information you need to sell effectively. Those who fail to do this work will not score points with their contacts when they ask questions that they could have discovered by doing the research.

If you are a sales leader, you should spend time with your sales team, helping them to understand their obligation to do the research that will professionalize their approach. When you and your team do this work and your competitors fail to do this work, you create an asymmetric advantage, as caring enough to do this work will cause your contacts to prefer to buy from your salespeople and your company.