Today is the day you have your big meeting with a new prospect. You have your slide deck on your tablet, and you are all set, right?
Before you go to your meeting, you need to know about four things that make you look bad to prospects. After all, the last thing you want is to look unprofessional and not very bright.
1. Lack of Knowledge about Your Prospect’s Business
If you don’t know anything about your prospect’s business, how are you going to solve any problems?
The level of competition in today's marketplace simply does not allow for ignorance of what your prospect's company does and the problems it faces. You need to get to know the prospect and the business so you can help clarify the problem you can solve. You cannot go in without knowing more than the name of the company and your contact.
Your prospect has likely already spent a major portion of the buyer’s journey researching potential solutions and companies that supply them. If your prospect is more prepared than you, it is unlikely you will get past the first meeting.
Potential customers do not have time to bring you up to speed; they expect you to know about their business and have at least the outline of a solution. If you do not, you will not be invited to return.
2. Not Preparing a Business Case
Providing a solution includes putting together supporting information. If the financial metrics you are using to justify your solution are not included with your proposal or, if you do not present any sort of business case, you are putting the onus onto the client to develop one to justify the purchase to the finance team or buying committee.
Without your input, the business case may not have the justification that financial decisions require. You will not have the chance to show exactly how your solution can help your customer to improve their business performance by increasing revenue or saving money.
3. Targeting the Wrong People
Marketing and sales teams produce messaging to generate leads and make conversions. Content is targeted to those who have been tasked to research a solution.
However, you need to also provide content that contains the type of data and information that will help to persuade the eventual decision makers, many of whom will have different goals than your original contact.
Create messaging and content to target each influencer (5.4 people are involved in a B2B purchasing decision according to CEB). If you try to persuade a financial decision maker with messaging about specific features, you will not be answering the right questions or leveraging the right information to support the business case and win the deal.
4. Fluffy Marketing Terms
Fluffy marketing terms do nothing to build a business case. There is no meat to them, nothing that shows how your solution will fix the problem. They fail to convey the value of your offering.
Fluffy words are vague and without substance. Fluffy words often end in -ity.
- Reliability
- Quality
- Durability
- Flexibility
- Elasticity
These words do have a purpose, but you need to go beyond them to convince the end users and the buying team. These words do not tell them anything about how much money your solution will save, how fast the return on investment will be, or how valuable it will be.
When you have a solution to sell, it is up to you to build the foundation, provide the data, and show how it solves the problem. Do not expect customers to connect the dots. If you do, you will have lost the ability to steer the conversation, and the deal, towards the value of your product or service.
