You finally got a meeting with a key customer executive that you’ve been pursuing for months. Congratulations! Now it’s time to prepare. Here’s what you need to do before you show up to the executive suite.
Do your homework and have a strategy in place before you walk through that door. Never improvise in a sales call with a top executive.
Your goal is to establish a growing relationship with this executive that leads to their sponsorship of your solution. Don’t focus on getting them to sign on the dotted line just yet. You want to get them interested enough in your proposal to take the next steps.
And that’s what you’re after. When you’ve got the backing of the executive suite, budget isn’t an issue. It appears. When you’ve got executive endorsement, competition isn’t an issue either. It quickly disappears.
Prepare for Success
To move your project into high gear, you’ll want the executive to engage by allocating some internal resources to evaluate your solution.
After you’ve done your due diligence and are convinced you’ve got a compelling value proposition, you’ve then got to convince them. Again, preparation breeds confidence.
Stand in front of the mirror and rehearse what you’re going to say. The order goes like this:
1. Make it clear you know what you’re doing there. Demonstrate you understand the customer’s business initiatives.
2. Get the executive’s permission to talk about a specific, customer-validated business driver that your solution could potentially impact.
3. Define metrics that are meaningful to the customer for measuring future business changes that indicate the initiative’s success.
4. Create a sense of urgency. What’s the implication of not acting?
5. Propose a plan for moving forward; specify the next steps.
Make sure one of those next steps is permission to meet again. You want to keep the executive involved. Tell them once you and their team work out the financial feasibility of your envisioned solution, you’ll schedule another meeting to go over the payback analysis.
Permission to meet again is absolutely critical. You’ve got to make it happen. Keep the executive focused on your project and their team will also be focused on your project.
That’s the beauty of executive sponsorship.
What works for you? What doesn’t? Comment below and let us know how you prepare for sales calls.
