Posted on January 10, 2009 - by Jeffrey Posner

Read your clients, turn on a dime if necessary

Can you turn on a dime?

I had an interesting experience the other day when on a conference call. A gentleman I work closely with in a sales capacity had set up a meeting with a real big name client. He had pitched them on improving their current mobile offerings on a popular TV show these days.

When getting on the call I was not sure how serious they were or if we were talking to the right people. After a few minutes I realized that not all of us were on the same page and chakras were about to be exploded. So I stepped in and changed direction on them. Instead of talking about the initial offering of how to improve their TV show thingy, I shifted focus on the core points of our system and how it can benefit them in other ways. That’s where I turned it…

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a fit for the initial reason and no one felt like they had wasted time or been improperly matched. On the flip side, this could have easily been a disaster where they shut us out completely if we had not re focused the attention on how cool and awesome our offering was…and still is!

I used to work at a company called Solid Streaming, a video software company that was trying to bring video to phones back in 1998 when we didn’t even have color screens yet! That story for another time… Anyway, we had this boss there who was quite the colorful character and was a maverick in meetings. He understood the importance of a meeting and how to walk the line so to speak. In fact, he knew it was so important that he would hand select people to go to meetings. You knew your game was on if you were going to meetings (and actually allowed to talk).

So if a meeting seems like its going sour, remember to focus on your strong points and how you can help them (the client), even if it’s not what you were initally there for…worst case senario, there is no match.

Better than getting you ass kicked