Align Your Agenda With Your Audience

Last week, I was out with the frontline sales. I was so happy to see excellent discovery meetings. The stakeholders we met kept taking notes and asked the sales executive for more information and to meet with the business owner next time. Perfect! This happened meeting after meeting until we met with a company where the stakeholders said: “No thank you, we are not interested. What happened? Why that reaction?

If you don’t align your agenda with your audience your meeting objective will fall on deaf ears.

Changing the Buyer’s Perspective

True, you prepare your meetings by finding insights that can help your stakeholders discover something they didn’t know. New knowledge can change their perspective on how to grow their business. When customers are in the Why Change? Phase, they are comfortable with what they have and do not see the need to make a change. However, you get their interest when you arrive at their table with new information.

No interest in your agenda

How unfortunate it is when the stakeholder you are meeting with doesn’t allow you to proceed with your intentions. Why not? Wouldn’t anyone be interested in new information that can help grow their business? What makes stakeholders respond like this? The simple reason is that they are not interested in your agenda. They have their own. And that was the reason why they agreed to meet with you. Your agenda is not aligned with theirs.

Horses for Courses

Companies choose suitable people for particular activities because everyone has different skills. Of course, over time, people climb up in organizations. Still, to maintain the efficient and effective deployment of a business’s intent, vision, and strategies, employees are organized into three primary layers of an organization: Operational, Management, and Executive Level.

The Operational level consists of people who, well, operate things. They are in Production, Sales and Marketing, Accounting, Customer Service, IT, Human Resources, etc. When meeting with them, they most likely have an agenda that helps them do their jobs better.

The same is true for management employees, but their responsibilities differ; they manage KPIs aligned with the strategy to achieve the company’s goals. Often, they run projects and recommend that their managers look at other opportunities and risks. They usually have to fight for budgets.

People at the Executive level are concerned about the company’s overall performance and where it should be headed next. Decisions about strategic changes are made here.

The Reality Check

Obviously, in this case, we were meeting with two stakeholders who were on the operational level. They wanted to discuss operational issues that they were tasked to fix. A great reality check is that to be effective at customer meetings, there is nothing more important than aligning your agenda with your audience before the meeting.

Send ahead of the meeting what you want to discuss ( and them to discover), but also allow the stakeholders you will meet with to add their agenda points. You will most likely need to satisfy these first before you can start the meeting you intend to have. After all, selling is helping! Then, if the discovery you want them to make is not at all in their street, ask:

Who else in your organization would have an interest in this?

Be in control of influential, successful meetings: Align your agenda with your audience.