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Question
Sales experts: any tips for running sales/demo meetings with large B2B customers?
I have a 30 min sales meeting with a potential enterprise customer coming up very soon. First one I've ever conducted, so I made sure it was an "easy" customer: a company I had worked at before where I know and have directly worked with the CTO. In general I'm planning on structuring the meeting like this:
- Intros on both sides (5min). For my part: I'll briefly mention that I worked at <company> for 5 years on x, y, and z projects and it's great to see everyone again, now a solo founder working on ☒ and based on my experience at <company>, I built ☒ to solve a problem I encountered there.
- Demo (10 min): I'll briefly explain which problem the product solves and show them the end-to-end workflow (live demo)
- Q&A (15 min): Open floor for them to ask questions about the demo, I'll mostly listen and respond but also near the end ask things like "what do the next steps look like for you all? I'd love to do a pilot with 1 repository and I'll personally help you onboard"
They've invited something like 20 people to the meeting and I have no idea who the real decisionmakers are.
Basically, the CTO of the company introed me to one of his organizations and he's definitely a decisionmaker, but the meeting is below his paygrade (he oversees the entire company which is quite literally thousands of engineers and multiple organizations) and the person who helped get people invited to the meeting is a Data Scientist, not someone with budget to allocate.
Questions:
1) Like I said, those types of roles (Data Scientists) don't get any budget to spend on stuff like this. How would you recommend I figure out who the right decisionmakers are if I'm not getting any movement after the meeting? I don't want to bother the CTO too much as he's got a lot going on + I've already spent some social capital so-to-speak getting the meeting in the first place.
2) That said: I figure I should spend most of the time asking questions and understanding requirements/blockers versus hard selling them on paying for a plan. What else would you recommend I cover in meeting #1 besides asking questions and getting further details on their requirements?
Thanks!
- Intros on both sides (5min). For my part: I'll briefly mention that I worked at <company> for 5 years on x, y, and z projects and it's great to see everyone again, now a solo founder working on ☒ and based on my experience at <company>, I built ☒ to solve a problem I encountered there.
- Demo (10 min): I'll briefly explain which problem the product solves and show them the end-to-end workflow (live demo)
- Q&A (15 min): Open floor for them to ask questions about the demo, I'll mostly listen and respond but also near the end ask things like "what do the next steps look like for you all? I'd love to do a pilot with 1 repository and I'll personally help you onboard"
They've invited something like 20 people to the meeting and I have no idea who the real decisionmakers are.
Basically, the CTO of the company introed me to one of his organizations and he's definitely a decisionmaker, but the meeting is below his paygrade (he oversees the entire company which is quite literally thousands of engineers and multiple organizations) and the person who helped get people invited to the meeting is a Data Scientist, not someone with budget to allocate.
Questions:
1) Like I said, those types of roles (Data Scientists) don't get any budget to spend on stuff like this. How would you recommend I figure out who the right decisionmakers are if I'm not getting any movement after the meeting? I don't want to bother the CTO too much as he's got a lot going on + I've already spent some social capital so-to-speak getting the meeting in the first place.
2) That said: I figure I should spend most of the time asking questions and understanding requirements/blockers versus hard selling them on paying for a plan. What else would you recommend I cover in meeting #1 besides asking questions and getting further details on their requirements?
Thanks!
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I feel like this is a really open and quite hard questions since it really depends on a lot of aspects. I would say that the approach you took of questions and really get to know the customer is the best. Because you already worked there, but now is not your company anymore, so you also have to pose yourself as an external entity and work that new relationship with every person in the room since you don’t know who’s the big fish. Then from a sales pov of course the fact that you already worked there is a big card to play when talking about a tailor made solution for them, but still remaining on this new relationship vibe. Hope this is clear, I am not really an expert, but maybe a feedback is always nice to hear. If you already did the meeting I would be interested to hear on how it went!