How To Run Your Second Meeting With A Prospect

Last month I described How To Run Your First Meeting With A Prospect. In this blog, I’m going to cover some principles on how to run your second meeting.

The goals of your second meeting with a prospect

If your prospect is looking for a solution, they’re likely having first and second meetings with several vendors. But no serious buyers will take a third meeting with a vendor they’ve decided isn’t right for them.

So by the end of your second meeting, your prospect will need to believe that you have a good understanding of their problem and that it’s likely you have a credible solution to that problem.

And for you to dedicate more time to this prospect, you will want to know that you’re working with a person and company with a high-priority problem you can solve, and that it’s likely they will spend money to solve that problem.

How to prepare for your second meeting

Similar to your first meeting with a few small changes:

Research any new people

If in your first meeting your prospect agreed to bring someone else to this meeting you’ll want to research them and see what role they might play in the buying cycle.

Prepare your questions

You will almost certainly have questions that you didn’t get time to ask in your first meeting. Also, the discovery you’ll want to do in this meeting will extend beyond just the problem itself to the impact of the problem.

Write out all the questions you have in your discovery document and try and order them in a way that would make sense in a conversation, prioritising the most important ones.

Send an agenda the day before

To remind them of the meeting and to set you up with an agenda. There’s an example at the end of this blog.

Customise your deck / demo

Use the information you got in the first meeting on the key problem(s) your prospect is trying to solve to customise your deck / demo so it relates to those specific pains.

You DO NOT want to show a generic demo in this meeting – if you do, you will very likely fail to build any momentum. More on this later.

Develop a hypothesis for the next step after this meeting

This could be a session to scope out the problem area in more depth. It could be to meet with other key stakeholders. It could be a deeper technical session you want to run on site.

Whatever it is, have a hypothesis prepared before the meeting so you know what you’re aiming to BAMFAM, even if you have to change this plan because of things you learn in the meeting itself.

How to structure your second meeting for maximum impact

The following structure can help to break a 60 minute meeting into different phases to make sure you have enough time for each element:

Phase 1 – Intros, rapport and agenda

Rapport is great, just keep an eye on the clock. If there are new people in this meeting, make sure you ask if there’s anything specific they want to cover.

You’ll have sent the agenda email a day before, so you can re-state this to get the meeting started:

‘We’ve got 60 minutes today, and my goal is to make this meeting as useful as possible for you. As I mentioned in my email, I thought a rough agenda for today could be as follows:

• First, I had a few follow-up questions from our last meeting that would be great to cover
• Then I’d like to share a deep dive into our solution, and answer any questions that you may have. I also have a couple of case studies of customers solving similar problems
• And then if we still feel like there’s a potential fit here, we can discuss next steps at the end of the meeting.

Does that sound good? Is there anything else you’d like to cover?

Phase 2 – Deeper discovery on pain and value impact

Start by recapping the main problems you understood from the first meeting to make sure they’re fresh in your prospect’s mind. You can use the summary email you sent to provide a concise recap of what you discussed.

‘When we spoke last time you mentioned you were looking to find a solution for X main areas.

• <Key problem 1 with brief description>
• <Key problem 2 with brief description>
• <Key problem 3 with brief description>

Are these still the main areas you want to concentrate on today? Has anything changed since we last spoke?’

If you get agreement on this, you can start asking your follow-up questions on their current situation and the problem(s) they’re trying to solve to delve down to the next level of detail.

As you delve deeper, make sure you also start to understand the impact of these problems as that will help you understand whether they have a high-priority problem that you can solve, as these are the only ones companies will usually pay to fix.

You don’t need to understand everything – if this meeting goes well, you should get more meetings to delve deeper – but you want to leave this meeting knowing if this is a prospect you want to keep working with.

See my blog Why Poor Discovery Is Killing Your Deals (And How To Fix It) for more details on how to do great discovery.

It’s important to end this phase with a Playback and Recap of the key problems and the main impacts of those problems to set you up for your demo.

Phase 3 – Customised deck / demo as it relates to discovery

As we mentioned under preparation, it’s really important to prepare a personalised, customised deck / demo that highlights solutions to the key pains that you uncovered during discovery.

Your prospect, particularly if they’re actively looking for a solution, will be talking to a number of other vendors who will also be giving them presentations and demos of their solutions.

So you’re in a competition. And it’s not a competition for the best solution. It’s a competition for your prospect’s mindshare.

So you’ve got to stand out. You’ve got to be remembered. Otherwise there will be no third meeting.

And the best way to be remembered is to focus on what your prospect needs, not on what you do. Present / demo solutions to their problems, not your features and functionality.

For example, rather than showing the full flexibility of your analytics dashboard, show how it can be configured to show specific data for one of the actual problems they’ve told you about, and how that data can be actioned to solve that specific problem.

At the end of the discovery phase of the meeting, you will have recapped the key pain points that you’ve uncovered. Then you should use your deck / demo to show solutions to each of those pains.

After you’ve done the recap, you can move into the demo saying something like:

‘So, if we start with <Key problem 1>, let me show you how we’re addressing that in our solution today.’

And then do the same for <Key problem 2> and <Key problem 3> if you have them.

You may also want to adapt what you show depending on the role and type of person you’ve engaged with in the first and second meeting.

Generally speaking, more technical personas will want to see problems solved from a technical point of view, so you’ll be more demo heavy with these folks.

More senior, less technical, people will usually want to see how their problems are solved from a business point of view, so think about if you need more slides than demo, most likely in conjunction with case studies of other companies who have solved similar problems.

For a more detailed dive into the different types of value that different stakeholders typically care about see our booklet Value Creation Explained.

Phase 4 – Map out and BAMFAM next steps

This is the phase of the meeting where you want to start mapping out what the buying and/or evaluation process looks like for the prospect so you can BAMFAM a meaningful next step.

My favourite question to start understanding the buying process is:

‘When do you need to be live with a solution?’

This one question can tell you a lot about where the prospect is in the evaluation process, whether they are actually in an evaluation process, as well as the role the person you’re speaking to might play in the buying process.

If you get a fairly vague answer, you’ll know you have more work to do to understand what the buying process looks like and if this really is a high-priority problem that the business is willing to pay to solve.

If you do get some sort of timeline, you can get a better understanding of where the initiative is coming from by asking:

• ‘What’s driving that timeline?’
• ‘Who’s driving that timeline?’

Other good questions to ask about the buying process are:

• Do you have an evaluation process already in mind?
  • What are the key steps in that?
• What’s the typical process for buying software in your business?
• Who would usually be the most senior person to get involved?
  • What do you think will be most important to them regarding this project?
• Who would typically own the budget for this type of project?
  • How would they usually get involved?
  • What sort of process do they usually follow to evaluate software purchases?
• How would your manager usually get involved in this sort of decision?
  • What do you think will be most important to them regarding this project?
• Who else would normally need to be involved?
  • What will be their role in this project?
• Who else will be interested in this project?
  • What will they be most interested in?
  • What would you think their role would be in this project?
• With most of the customers I’ve worked with, the decision to move ahead normally sits with X or Y – would that be the same for you?
• I’ve often also found it very helpful to include Z in these discussions – would that make sense for you?

Bear in mind that you’re not going to want to ask all of these within a single meeting, or your prospect will feel like they’re being interrogated. So pick the questions that you feel are most appropriate for the situation.

Whatever questions you ask, whatever answers you get, before you end this meeting you must BAMFAM the next step.

As with the first meeting, you need to proactively suggest the next step, otherwise you’ll find yourself in ‘Let me get back to you’ territory (aka the Sales Valley of Death).

The next step from the second meeting will very likely be specific to your solution and to your type of prospects. However, here are a few examples to get you thinking:

• Technical deep dive session with a wider team
• Presenting your solution to your contact’s boss
• Session to get other key stakeholders up to speed
• Deeper scoping meeting of the problem that needs to be solved and the success metrics of any deployment
• Business case / ROI meeting

Once you’ve closed 10+ deals with the same sorts of companies, you’ll have a much better idea of what the most productive next steps should be.

Also think about whether the next meeting should be in person – you can see my blog Get On A Plane for why this is so important.

After the meeting send a short summary email of what you’ve discussed. This will help your prospect to remember you and will also help you set up the next meeting. I’ve put an example of this email at the end of this article as well.

Best of luck managing your second meetings with prospects!

Any questions, just DM me or email me at ben@crane.vc

Additional resources: Prospect Meeting email templates here.