Conducting First Meetings With First-Time Consulting Buyers

An old Chinese proverb says, “Victory goes to the one with superior forces at the point of contact.” In the movie "Braveheart", at the battle of Stirling, in the first impact with the powerful force of the English army, the Scots used very long spears to defeat the English heavy horses.

Since the Scots, in spite of being outnumbered by the English 5 to 1, successfully annihilated the heavy horses, the English army was basically defeated on impact, and the rest of the battle was “mere” formality.

What that means in business is that you have to create a powerful point of impact with your prospects, although, unlike the Scots in the movie, you may not want to kill them. Nevertheless this impact will define the fate of your whole sales process from first meetings to the end of projects.

This first in-person encounter either reinforces your status in your buyers’ minds regarding whether you are a respected industrial expert or just another replaceable vendor. Based on your lead generation and lead nurturing, buyers have perceived notions of your company.

If you’ve done true industrial authority type lead generation and lead nurturing, that is, you used valuable content not sales pitches, then your buyers expect to meet an expert not a salesperson. But if your lead generation and lead nurturing have been overly “vendorish”, that is, constant and never ending pitching, then buyers have probably relegated you to the purchasing departments, and now all that matters is how cheap your products/services are.

And this is what we discuss in this month's brain-fryingly exciting episode of Tomicide Solutions, entitled, Conducting First Meetings With First-Time Consulting Buyers.

 Enjoy!