What Not to Do on a First call
So today is a big day today. I got my first response back from a potential client for my business. Sure I used to work for the company and I deleted the DNS records connected to my gmail AFTER i sent the cold email only to be notified via text by a friend at the company that my email was inaccessible, but I'm a startup and I'm gonna make mistakes.
The important thing is... I got the meeting. I got the meeting with a potential client to talk about what makes their life difficult and will come back later to talk about how my services and products could solve some of the issues they are facing. Is that the right thing to do? I was advised to be coy and pretend to not know about their issues and use it as a time to build a presentation with my software catered to their issues.
To give you a bit more context this business that I am building is a company geared toward transit agencies to supply custom trip planners as well as an cloud based call center solution / setup of some sort of ticketing system.
Goals of the meeting:
- find out the volume of the call center (in an attempt to calculate cost and server size)
- find out 5 pain points (create a presentation and tech that will suite their needs)
- find my companies value in the ecosystem (justify my and companies value)
I want to hear about the mistakes you made and if I am leaving something on the table.
I'd cut to 1 pain-point. The narrower, the better. Get as much detail as possible on the top most painful point.
I would cut down 5 pain points to 2 pain points. Most people are focused on just 1-2 of the most pressing initiatives on their plate and not much more than that.
Go into the meeting with the expectation that you won't sell anything and look for something valuable you can do for meeting #2. For instance, if you are speaking to their pain point and they sound interested, suggest for a follow-up meeting that you'll show them screen shots of what you've built and they can get an idea of what you're doing. This only works if they've verbalized a pain point and you've spoken to that pain point with your solution.