Basically, GO MEET YOUR PROSPECTS IN PERSON.
I am, frankly, astonished by how many times I see early-stage founders and salespeople trying to win meaningful deals without meeting their prospects in person.
Pre-Covid, it wasn’t even an option to not meet your prospects in person. If you wanted to sell a deal over 10k, your prospects expected you to come to their office. And why wouldn’t they? If they were putting their name to a five or six figure deal, their reputation would be on the line, perhaps even their job, so of course they wanted to meet you in person.
But Covid changed all that because, for a while, meeting in person wasn’t possible, so people were forced to get used to buying software without meeting the people who were selling it.
The problem is a lot of founders and sellers are still doing that today.
I get it because it’s very time-effective. Why spend half a day or even a whole day travelling and meeting a prospect when you could do that in an hour and get on with the hundred other things you need to do that day?
Well, here’s why.
Meeting in person builds trust.
You get to know people, more quickly, more deeply.
- Meeting in person allows you to dig more deeply into discovering the problem your prospect wants to solve, how important that problem is to them, what their ideal solution would look and feel like, how quickly they need it in place, and whether it is, in fact, a need, a must-have, or just a nice-to-have.
- Meeting in person helps you ask these questions with much more nuance.
- Meeting in person forces everyone to pay attention, or at least allows you to see more clearly who’s engaged, who’s interested, who is actually looking for a solution to a problem they have right now and who isn’t.
- Meeting in person allows you to read body language, see nonverbal cues, and understand if there’s subtext beyond what people are actually saying.
- Meeting in person helps you build more excitement about solving your prospect’s problem.
- Meeting in person makes it easier for you to book in the next meeting.
- Meeting in person allows you to ask more questions about the decision-making process, who the real stakeholders are, and what they care about.
- Meeting in person allows you to better understand the business and its environment, as well as to get a sense of its culture and the type of people who work there.
Even the walk from reception to the office where you’re meeting or the walk back at the end of the meeting will allow you to ask questions and learn things that you can never learn when you meet online. Even as the coffees are being handed out, you are learning about the person and about the company.
You will never learn more about a prospect than when you meet them in person.
There’s a saying that people buy from people they like. Which is partly true; it would be difficult to buy something important from someone you dislike. But what’s really true is that people buy from people they trust.
Meeting in person allows you to build more trust with your prospects.
Should you have every first meeting in person? Probably not, if you have any sort of decent pipeline of prospects, that would be impractical. But if you don’t have much pipeline and the prospect seems reasonably well qualified, you should consider it, particularly if the prospect is within a couple of hours travelling time. If nothing else, you’ll learn a lot more about their initial reaction to the way you run your meetings, your pitch, your solution.
Or if the first meeting is with one of your ‘dream’ prospects – totally ICP, could be one of your cornerstone accounts if you win them, exactly the right persona you should be engaging with – then you absolutely should consider it.
And as you progress through your sales cycles, think about what other meetings could be pivotal to your deal.
Your prospect wants to bring another stakeholder to a meeting, possibly another key or senior stakeholder. Does that sound like a good opportunity to meet them in person?
Your prospect wants to do a technical session with some of their key technical folks, does that sound like a meeting you should have in person, possibly bringing your Sales Engineer with you?
You feel you’re losing momentum with a prospect and want to understand if your Champion really is championing you and your solution in their business, does that sound like an opportunity to take them to lunch and find out?
Your prospect has suggested you meet with their boss, or their boss’s boss – does that shout ‘Meeting In Person’ to you?
For the avoidance of doubt, the answer to all of those questions is ‘Yes!’
And for the further avoidance of doubt, these are all situations I’ve come across recently when I’ve had to ask the founder, or salesperson, ‘Why aren’t you having that meeting in person?’
For prospects who themselves seem less keen to meet in person, I’m a big fan of the ‘actually I’ll be in your area/town that day/week’ to take the pressure off them about the meeting, so they’re more likely to agree to put a face-to-face in their calendar.
So when you’ve finished reading this, go back to your CRM, or however you’re managing your pipeline today, look at the prospects and deals you have in play today, look at every upcoming meeting you have, and then every meeting you want to arrange as the next step in the process and ask yourself ‘Would this be a good meeting to have in person?’
To help you answer that question, imagine if I were selling a competitive solution to yours to the exact same prospects. I’d be looking through my pipeline every day for every opportunity to meet those prospects in person, build trust, ask deeper questions, build excitement about my solution, and create more compelling value propositions.
Get on a plane! (Or bus or car or train)!