Relax.

Breathe.

Ok.

Look past the name and think about what you’ll actually be doing. Is a requirements gathering meeting a meeting to gather requirements? Hell no! You’ll be meeting your contact(s) face to face, they’ll be telling you all about the day-to-day problems they have in your area of expertise, and they have already decided you’re worth listening to because they’ve given you their time.

What more could you ask for? An open forum for a potential customer to talk openly about what you might be able to do for them? Yes please! Not to mention the fact that you’ll be networking, building a new relationship, and making the client aware of who you are and what you’re capable of. It’s not what you know, it’s who the people that you know know!

So, fasten your seatbelt; and turn your requirements gathering meeting into a ‘relationship building, marketing, awareness, solution scoping, future upselling’ meeting. Oh and here are a few tips that might help.

Get Ready to Rumble

1. Know your audience – Ideally you should know the job roles of the people you are going to see so you can tailor your message to their level (both hierarchical and technical)
2. Prepare – Time spent preparing is never time wasted. Know your material inside out and try to think up a few potential questions that may get asked. Run through your message and materials with a few of your colleagues. Choose a good mix of people to ensure you have input from different perspectives
3. Know your offerings – It goes without saying that you should know your products and solutions inside out. So you’ve arranged to see the CFO but what’s to stop the network engineer showing up?
4. Know your limitations – Don’t promise anything during the meeting outside the set agenda. If it’s not on the agenda don’t be afraid to take action items away, this will also keep the relationship and communication…

In the Hot Seat

1. Listen – Use the time to listen to what your client has to say. Talking too much makes you sound like you’re selling. Listening means you care about your clients problems.
2. Don’t sell – Don’t try to sell anything in a requirements gathering meeting. Ever. You’re there to gain an understanding of the issues your client faces. Taking requirements away and returning with a solution tailored to their needs makes the client feel special.
3. Don’t waffle – Keep your questions and conversation concise and on-topic. Is English your clients’ first language? If not think about what you’re going to say before you say it. Is there a simpler way to put it?
4. Don’t baffle – Tailor your conversation to the clients level of understanding. Throwing technical jargon and acronyms at a non-technical client will only alienate them.

You’ve Escaped!

Phew! The meeting is over, but hopefully your relationship is just beginning. Make sure you build on these foundations and keep the communication going.

1. Thank you – Drop your client a quick email after the meeting (maximum two days later) thanking them for their time and confirming any actions taken away with timescales
2. Materials – Did you use or refer to any presentations or documents during your meeting? Send your client a copy.
3. Update – Maintain constant contact with your client while preparing their solution; giving a quick progress update every few days until delivery.

The sweet old dear would then smile back, force herself up out of her old chair, tear herself away from her three bar fire and create my well-earned bag of treats.

She’d stop sometimes and look up at me, I could see in her eyes she was weighing me up to work out which 10 sweets would please me the most. A white chocolate button maybe (you know the ones with the rainbow bits on)? No

He had one last week. One of my new sherbet space ships? Maybe, we’ll throw one in. He’s too young for bubble gum. All these thoughts would go through her head as I patiently waited for my hand-picked bespoke array of sugary goodness.

After what seemed like a fortnight, she’d complete the magic ten, and in one swift move spin the bag over, sealing in the sweets and hand them over. Thank you. See you next week.

I’d leave the shop feeling really valued and appreciated as a customer.

This went on for a few years until one day the ‘sweet old lady’ decided to optimise. Optimise? Optimise!

As usual I was handed my pocket money on the Saturday morning – I remember it like it was yesterday. I frolicked around to the shop as usual, asked for my 10p mix. The shopkeeper got out of her old chair, tore herself away from the three bar fire, and created my well-earned bag of treats. Only she didn’t did she? Oh no she didn’t. She reached under the counter and pulled out a pre-made 10p mix!

‘NO!’ You cry; and right you are. I stood staring in shock as the ‘sweet old dear’ returned to her chair. Then left.

Quick Wins

Making your customers feel valued often costs nothing.  Put yourself in your customers shoes, do you make them feel special in any way? Do you serve them or ‘process’ them? Are there any small changes you could make to your processes to make your customers feel more valued?

I’m betting there are

* For the youth of today; pocket money refers to a fixed amount of money provided by parents to their children on a weekly or monthly basis. And no, we couldn’t have whatever we wanted when we wanted it. There was no such thing as a tantrum either.

 ** A 10p mix is simply a paper bag with ten one penny sweets in it. Yes we only got 10 sweets at a time, and yes you could buy sweets that cost 1p each.

You take your new prized possession straight home, open the box, and throw anything that lies between you and the phone over your shoulder (you know like instruction manuals, earphones, screen wipe, case etc.).
For the next couple of weeks you live a joyous life. The vast array of apps that you have installed make your life so much easier you don’t know how you ever survived without them.

Then it happens.

You call your friend to tell them about the new update to the twitbookspace app and they can’t hear you. They call you back and you scream at the phone, desperate to get the news through about the new location-based integration that lets you know EXACTLY where everyone is (to within 500m) you scream into the microphone. Alas, you have failed my friend.

You perk up and try to inform them via SMS but the screen locks up. As you try to pry off the back cover to perform a highly technical ‘battery pull’ you decide that maybe what you really needed all along was your trusty old ‘dumb’ phone. You know, the one that made calls for years and never skipped a beat. The one that was swiftly Mazuma’d as soon as you saw the shiny case of your new smart phone.

Back to the shop.

You explain everything that has happened in great detail, from the moment you held your new baby to the second you returned to the shop. Right up to now when the assistant is still trying to look interested before telling
you that they have a 14-day return or exchange policy, and the update you made to your phones firmware voided that anyway. Damn small print.

The point here is that now the Telco has a customer with 23 months of payments left for a phone that doesn’t work properly. Sure they may pay up for the next 23 months but will they renew? Will they change their contract to the lowest priced tariff and take out a secondary one (with a new handset)? Or will they purchase an identical phone to the one they had before and stick their new SIM card in it?

Bad experience reduces loyalty; and unfortunately subscribers will link poor handset design to the Telco rather than to the manufacturer.
Maybe exchange and refund policies, handset quality assurance processes and customer feedback/returns analysis should be part of RA BAU?