Seven Things To Do Before and After Customer Meetings
Have you been struggling with getting positive results from your customer meetings? This post should fix that problem as it provides seven things to do before and after.
Customer meetings are very important as they give you an understanding of the work to be done. You get to learn about your customers’ needs and have a chance to share your solutions before execution.
One of the challenges with these meetings is that they could unfold very quickly and go beyond what you planned. A short meeting of about ten minutes on paper can transform into a two-hour meeting in real-time. Despite spending so much time, without a proper plan, the meeting may end up unproductive.
How do to make your customer meetings more productive? Check out seven things you should do before and after your meetings.
Before Customer Meetings
What do you do before customer meetings? Here are a few things that can help you get the best results.
Decide on your goals
Before you even schedule a meeting with your customer, you should figure out your goals. What do you hope to achieve from meeting with a specific customer? The goals for each meeting should be different even if you will be marketing the same product or service. This is because customers are different in their needs, personalities, and expectations. Write down your goals for each meeting and speak about them to the rest of your team.
Choose a convenient time
The base goal for every meeting is to have as many stakeholders as possible in attendance. When you consider this statement, you agree that you need to choose a convenient time for everyone involved. It isn’t about you but the customer and other stakeholders. Speak to them ahead and ask when and where they prefer to meet. Once they settle on a time, relate the time to your team members and let everyone involved get themselves ready.
Draw an agenda
As mentioned earlier, meetings planned to be short on paper can quickly spiral into very long meetings. When this happens, it doesn’t help anyone. You end up wasting time without achieving the goals for the meeting. Prepare an agenda aligned with the meeting goals and share it with all attendees. Let them know how many minutes each item on your agenda is allotted. Doing this allows them to prepare with the time in mind.
Get your software and presentation ready
Your goals and agenda are ready, and you have chosen the time and place for the meeting. Great job, but that’s not all. Now, you need to prepare your team for the meeting. Ensure that all the software needed is available and your presentation is ready. Remember that you don’t have two chances to make a first impression. Flop this meeting, and you have lost the customer to the competition. You can’t afford that to happen as it could result in more losses than you bargained for. Speak to the client ahead to find out their expectations. Use this information to put together the best pitch possible.
After Customer Meetings
You’ve had a great meeting with your customers buzzing about your ideas. Don’t lose guard and think the work is done. You’ve only completed a phase, here’s what you should do after customer meetings:
Share meeting documentation
Customers often want to have undivided attention during meetings. As a result, they hardly write down points from what you are saying. Even members of your team may be distracted by dealing with your customers that they forget to write things down. This is where sharing meeting documentation comes in. Send the minutes of the meeting and copies of your presentation to all attendees. You can make it easier through Google Drive or other cloud storage platforms. Doing this makes it easy for all parties involved to track progress.
Assign tasks
Don’t just thrill your customers with great presentations, then go to sleep on the tasks. What tasks have you agreed on towards the completion of a project during the meeting? Ensure that you get all the details. Break the tasks into modules and assign them to different members of your team. You can make use of project collaboration suits like Asana or Trello for easy task-tracking. Also, set up follow-up team meetings to discuss tasks, set KPIs, and track task completion before your next customer meeting.
Request feedback
Don’t believe that you have it all together because you are the team lead. That’s not the way it works. No man is an island of knowledge. Speak to your customers and your team members to find out what they felt about your meeting. Doing this after customer meetings presents you with a clear picture of what you did well and where you need improvement. You can craft a short questionnaire and share it with your customers. Ask them to send in their comments so that you can review them with your team.
Conclusion
Customer meetings don’t have to be unproductive or meaningless. This post has provided you with seven things to do before and after customer meetings. Has this been helpful? Kindly share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Meanwhile, feel free to surf SME360 for articles that will help you improve your business.
