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Introduction

In this Growth Engine daily video.

I want to talk about the blindness of the meetings.

What I mean about the blindness of meetings is I’ve recently attended some, what I would call, sales related meetings with a client.

I was sitting in the boardroom a few weeks ago with a client, and they were speaking about, we’ve been offered this opportunity to work with this large global player.

I’m not sure how real the opportunity is.

However they’re saying this, and they’re saying that.

We’ve had our time wasted before, and we don’t want to do that here.

We’re busy enough.

Do we think we should progress it?

What Is The Best Way To Approach A New Opportunity?

So, I ask the team what they thought the best approach was, and they said well, let’s set up a meeting.

I said okay.

So what is that meeting going to cover?

Do you know what is our goal?

I call them because we’re Mike Midgley Executive, we call them success goals.

When our team go into a meeting, we’ve done our research.

We’ve checked it out, and we also know what we want to cover by agenda, documented in advance to the other participants.

But also internally, what are our success goals?

First, you come out of that meeting and say was that a success.

We need to be able to put checkboxes in all the areas that we see as successful.

Naturally, that helps us gear our agenda around that.

So we work with the client to sort of pick out three to four success goals.

Yesterday, we actually attended those meetings in the South of England with two specific companies.

What originally started out as a sort of not a flippant discussion, it was more of a pipeline discussion inside the business in the boardroom.

Yesterday turned out that not only is that global provider.

I wouldn’t use the word desperate to deal with us because that would be you know it wouldn’t be accurate.

But they’re exceptionally keen to deal with us as our specialist service.

This is not us as Mike Midgley Executive or my coaching company, this is my client who works in logistics.

Their appreciation for our expertise is so great.

There were three things that when we came out of the meeting, I spoke with my client and said how did you feel it went.

He said I think it went okay.

1. They look to start partnerships, not just trading relationships.
2. They look to give priority and solid agreements.
3. They look to trial these arrangements from 90 days on smaller sets of data or pieces of business if you want to call it that, and then they build up on that.

If we do a job over 90 days, then they would increase it.

Now, our particular logistics client has got a certain amount of capacity.

For the sake of confidentiality, I won’t disclose that here.

But they’ve got a certain amount of capacity of how many drivers they have, how many vehicles they have, how many routes that they can plan each day.

Just the subset of test data and trial account probably equates to something in the region of 50% of our current business.

If that were to scale up to double, double, and double again, it could actually double our entire current business just off this one account.

So what I’m asking you to do here is look at your business.

Look at these opportunities.

Sit down with your sales team.

Are You The One Asking Questions?

If you are the head of sales, sit down with your individual team members and start to ask questions about these opportunities.

Really what I’m asking you to think about is what is their biggest opportunity?