A key thing I have learned with meetings is you need to know your outcome before the meeting starts. This is especially important the first time you meet a potential customer. What does a successful outcome mean? I think a lot of time we tend to wing things and end out wasting hours of time talking about unnecessary items and trying to make points that are not relevant to the matter at hand.
My outcome when I first meet a client is to learn as much about their business in the shortest amount of time possible. I try not to talk about our business or technology unless repeatedly prompted, but instead focus on listening to them. When you are a small consulting shop picking a great client/project is the most important thing you do and the only way to accomplish that is by sublimating your ego and immersing yourself in their world for 45min to an hour.
The next time you leave a 2 hour meeting, ask your self how much of that was you talking, you leading and how much much was you listening. You will find that you could have halved the time by staying quiet.
A big goal for me is to ask lots of questions and avoid making statements as much as possible.
Avoid negative absolutes like "We don't, I never, that doesn't, we can't" and instead use your experience as a guide "We tend not to, We don't often recommend".
I don’t expect to make a sale in the first meeting, wow them with our past work or give them a rundown of our business process. If it naturally happens or they ask I am more than willing to go though it. My only outcome in the first meeting is to decide in my head whether or not this is a client or project that I want to work on.
The first meeting also sets the tone for the project and that tone becomes part of the choice to take the work. You should all look forward to a client coming in the door, if you don’t you should take a hard look at whether you should be doing the project.
There are other elements that make up a great project (reasonable budget, responsible timeline, domain knowledge and business experience) but at the end of the day if you don’t look forward to spending hours and hours of time with them the rest doesn’t really matter.
You can’t get caught up in trying to pay your bills because one bad client will cost more in time and stress than 5 good clients.
At Unspace 12% of our customers account for over 50% of revenue.
That forced us to spend more time picking the next great customer as opposed to pitching our services and in the long run made our cash flow stable and our developers happier.