What Kinds Of Things Do You Learn In A Good Meeting?

Everyone has a point of view. You may think something is simple, but from someone else’s point of view it may seem extremely complex. How do you think a typical conversation like this will go?

Take something from any newspaper in any country on any given day. The answer to illegal immigration is to round everyone up and put them in prison. Simple, right?

Or is it more complex than that? What resources are required to round people up? What happens when you inevitably arrest the wrong person. How much more expensive is it to incarcerate people than let them work while their claims are dealt with? And so on.

My work is much simpler. It’s usually about problems of business which are much more tractable than social ones.

Even in those situations, however, it’s almost impossible to know what’s in someone else’s mind. I read some research recently (I should get better at saving these references for later) that suggested we predict how other people think correctly around 8% of the time. So, most of the time we have no idea what they think.

It’s worse when we hope they’ll agree with us. This is why sales is a hard job. Many salespeople are given a product description and told to push it. Often the mental model underpinning the product has not been informed by the mental model that the customer has of the situation they face. This misalignment means that they don’t buy. Or if they do, they are disappointed by the experience.

It’s much easier to see the tensions and commonalities between points of view when these points of view are expressed and laid out on the page. A salesperson that learns what a prospect really needs has the opportunity to redesign or represent their product to show how it can help in that situation. That’s real added value.

Gary Halbert has this story where he asks a room of marketers how they would sell a fast food product from a van. Would they focus on quality? Speed? Put on promotions? He’d tell the room that they could do anything they wanted and he’d beat on sales volume them as long as he had one thing – a hungry crowd.

When you have a conversation with someone that’s a deep exploration of their situation rather than a pushy sales message then you start to see what their problems are and where they need work done to improve the situation. However, not all improvements are worth doing – you don’t need to pitch to help with everything. Instead, you need to find places that need work that the prospect is also going to be willing to pay for.

I’m in the middle of a long and painful renovation project. We’re through the worst of it, but we need the bathroom sorting out. There are lots of problems, but one issue is that the bath is leaking. That’s a pain, but it can wait until we sort the whole room out. We just won’t use the bath. There’s also a hole in the roof, with water coming into a newly decorated room. That needs to be fixed now. During your conversations with clients you’re looking for roof-type problems rather than we-can-wait-until-later type problems.

An open conversation makes it much easier to talk through what needs to be done and who’s going to do what. Most prospects are nervous that consultants are going to propose a big and expensive programme of work and throw low-level staff at high day rates at them, while delivering very little of value at the end. What they really need is to get the work done, not be given a big, expensive report on how to do the work that is short on detail and addresses the wrong issue altogether.

The answer is to use the resources that are already available to do as much of the work as possible and clearly show how any new resources are required because there is more work to do. You need to demonstrate the “additionality” of the resources. If I bring in a few people to work on a task that’s because there is no one at client’s firm that can do it already. Anyone who runs a business understands that you need resources. The question is whether the resources are being used productively or not. The discussion we have helps to work through this.

Many meetings are run badly. If you can run good meetings, you can create a good business. Being able to get a team to work well together is, unsurprisingly, a source of competitive advantage.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh