Sales & Business Development Blog

The first 30 seconds of your first meeting with a senior executive decision maker will have a major impact on the outcome of your meeting. Furthermore, if you’re a Key Account Manager or Account Director, it can determine your ultimate success with the account relationship on an ongoing basis.

To make a high value sale, you need to get the appropriate senior exec’s sponsorship and support and, for the reasons we’ll cover, you have to be able to set the direction for the rest of the meeting right up front in the first 30 seconds. By ‘setting the direction’ for the meeting we mean being able to set the theme and tone for the dialogue in order to guide the conversation towards your desired end result.

The Challenge

So why is success in the first 30 seconds so vital in a sales meeting with an exec?

Well, for a start, execs are busy and trust their instincts so you need to make the vital first few seconds of the meeting a high impact phase in terms of establishing rapport, credibility and a sense of potential value in return for the investment of their time. However, achieving this is getting more difficult (and should be achieved much earlier in the meeting) because execs are typically having to work much harder in today’s economic climate. Today’s execs tend to only get involved in ‘strategic’ purchase decisions that have a direct impact on the strategic success of the business. So if you start by talking about the features, advantages or benefits of your company or products, they will immediately decide you are wasting their time and, at best, you’ll get delegated to meet someone at a much lower level in the future. FAB selling is dead!

Secondly, senior execs have egos and are (mostly) very professional so they expect a significant level of professionalism and respect in return. They expect you to ask them for their opinions on subjects that are topical or relevant to them, but you must also demonstrate credibility by making it clear that you have done your own research and have your own ideas.

Thirdly, because they are typically fast-thinking and focussed on outcomes, executives will grab control of the meeting unless you set the theme and direction for the meeting right up front and get their buy-in to that up front. Regardless of the size of the organisation they run, their perspective of their own position compared to your position as a potential provider, will cause them to naturally start talking down to you unless you manage to assert an adult-to-adult conversation right from the start.

So, in summary, if you’re going to succeed in the first thirty seconds of the first sales meeting with a senior executive, you have to establish rapport, credibility and interest while demonstrating professionalism, insight, credibility and potential value to the executive. On top of all of this, if you are going to sell to them, you have to get the exec to tell you about the most pressing existing or future pain-points (in terms of organisational performance) and their priority objectives (in terms of desire for improvements in that performance).

On first appearances, to achieve all of this in the first 30 seconds seems like an impossible task!

However, the good news is that it’s actually easy, despite the fact that the vast majority of the exec sales meetings we observe fail in their objective specifically because the sales person has lost control, interest or credibility within the first 30 seconds of the meeting.

The Solution

We propose two sales techniques, to be used in sequence, that will bring you success every time. The techniques we propose are called ‘signposting’ and ‘the powerful question’. Both are covered more fully in our online sales training programme Black Belt Selling, but we’ve given an introduction to these techniques below.

Signposting

Signposting is the term we use for an introduction which involves what we call the ‘3 P’s’:

• Purpose – your responsibilities and the background to the meeting
• Process – how you would like to conduct the meeting and/or a recap of the agenda (which you have already agreed prior to the meeting)
• Pay-off – the benefit you are committing to bring the exec at the end of the meeting or as a follow-up.

Headlining the ‘pay-off’ is probably the most important element of signposting as it creates the exec’s interest and gives you the right to: a) control the direction for the meeting and b) ask your ‘powerful question’ and probe when you are given the answers. However, the ‘pay-off’ is what many sales people actually fail to mention during their introduction. The result is that the exec is left thinking ‘so what’s in this meeting for me?’

An example of signposting could be:

“As you know from my mail, I’m the new SellCo account manager for your organisation. I wanted to meet you because I’m committed to making sure that the solutions SellCo proposes to you and your people meet your strategic requirements. I’ve conducted a significant amount of research but I’d like to check my understanding of your priorities by asking you some specific questions. Once I’ve qualified your priorities, I’d like to come back to you with some outline proposals that can really make a difference for you and your organisation. Is that okay with you?”

Powerful Question

Once you’ve got agreement to your signposting, you’ve earned the right to ask your powerful question. That’s the succinct pre-planned open question that:

i) Sets the theme for the conversation in the sales meeting;
ii) Gets the exec to trust you enough to tell you about their current and potential pain-points;
iii) Gets the exec to treat you as an equal and have an adult-to-adult, strategic conversation with you.

Some examples of powerful questions could be:

To a retailer when you want to open up a dialogue about using the internet as a new channel to market: “How will the new low cost online competitors entering your market affect you, given the economic pressures on your client’s disposable income?”

To a chief of a local council when you want to open up a dialogue on the opportunities for the provision of automated services: “How is the increased demand for 24 hour services affecting you in the light of the government spending cuts?”

Notice that the questions are not fully ‘open’. A fully open question would be something like: “What are your biggest problems at the moment?”, which could bring a response from any direction (including “You at this very moment’ from the more mischievous execs!). Furthermore, these questions are not ‘closed’ questions. They do not demand a “yes” or “no” answer, but they are slightly leading questions as they ‘frame’ the direction or theme of the conversation through the choice of the context they present.

To learn exactly how to use ‘signposting’ and ‘powerful questions’ and for examples in action, check out Black Belt Selling, our online sales training programme, for immediate access to a range of sales techniques that will transform your sales performance.

Written by: Steve Eungblut, Managing Director of Sterling Chase