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How to get meetings

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how to get meetings

How to get meetings with your ideal clients?

If your target market is certain types of local businesses, say, and your goal is to acquire another 25 or 30 of them as your customers this year, then you do not need to embark upon complex email campaigns, squeeze pages, or invest lots of time developing your social media presence, your Facebook page or running glossy ads in magazines. You’ve simply got to ask for the meeting. And that needs to be your crystal clear objective. Now, what I know is, most of the marketing material I see fails at this first hurdle, people lose sight of this crystal clear objective. So, if the objective of the letter or your piece of marketing is to get a meeting.

Then you need to be really clear that that’s what the objective is.

On that basis then you do not need to, nor do you want to sell your product or service in that letter, because the purpose of the letter isn’t to sell your product and service. It’s to sell the reasons why the prospect should meet with you, or talk with you on the telephone, which is different from trying to sell the product, does that makes sense?

And so many people, so many pieces of marketing fail at this first hurdle.

And I chose my description earlier for this really carefully. I didn’t just say, clear objective. I used the word crystal clear objective. You see, it needs to be so blindingly obvious what you are trying to do

The more clarity you have around what you want people to do, the more people will do it.

And so much marketing gets muddled and muddy because the objective isn’t clear. Sometimes it is clear at the beginning, but then the person writing it gets carried away. And rather than getting the meeting they are now trying to sell the product and all the features and all the benefits and there are this many add ons and this and that and the other and the price is this, and none of that is relevant, when you’re trying to sell the meeting.

Marketing really can be very, very straightforward

If you want a relatively small number of new clients who are going to be based within a fairly small geographic radius then the smartest thing to do is just ask for the meeting. I had a call at the beginning of this year from a lady who’d taken over the marketing of a printer – and I use a few printers. She simply rang up, asked if we were still buying print, and when I said we were, she said that she would be passing our offices the following day, handing out some chocolates and could she just pop in and drop them off. It was a very inoffensive, well-delivered pitch to get a meeting and, guess what, it worked. The same approach will probably work for you.

What you have to think about is giving your potential prospect a strong enough reason for them to see you

(in this case chocolate worked really well – and it might do for you also) and, as well, be smart about the amount of time that you are asking for. Something along the lines of “I’ve got this really cool thing that I think could make a real difference to you… can I have 17 minutes of your time next week to pop in and show it to you?” And then shut up. Now, I’m not saying that every single person you approach will say “Yes”, but, if you deliver it well, a lot will and you’ve just short-circuited a whole load of fluff and puff and accelerated the growth of your business. In some cases, it won’t be easy to engineer a conversation with the person you want to talk to, but then, few things in life are easy and there are lots of ways you can make that conversation happen.

Finding ways to get a meeting with your well-defined target market is a smart use of your time and energy.

Using all your contacts, your networking groups and LinkedIn all have a part to play here. “I thought you liked all this marketing stuff” you might ask. “No”  is the answer, “what I like is the results and that’s all that matters so  you should try and short- circuit things here…” To be clear, you do have to deliver this well, and you have to think, very much, about what you can do for the person you want to see rather than what they can do for you. Put yourself in their shoes. What would you say to an approach like the one you’re planning to make? Be honest here. Don’t fall into the trap of kidding yourself. We all live in the real world. So get real with your thinking and, indeed, your marketing approach.

Sometimes, how to get a meeting is way more straightforward than you originally thought…

For help with getting meetings or any other marketing material give us a call we are full of great ideas that can get you the meetings with the people you want to meet. Schedule a call with Rachel here        

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