Couple of weeks ago I made a rookie misstake while talking with one of the leads that reached out to our agency. Because the person that I talked to wasn’t a decision maker I was asked if I could instead have a meeting with their decision maker to talk more about our SEO solutions. We scheduled a time for the meeting which was within couple of hours from the call. Unfortunately it turned out in the meeting that they had different expectations at that time then what I had understood from the first call.
This made me share a quick ‘lesson learned’-tweet of this ridiculous mistake and hopefully have other people avoid the same. The reason this is so ridiculous is because even though we do have a process for all the calls to avoid these kind of mistakes I missed to fully follow it in this particular call. Had I followed the process and confirmed the purposes (instead of guessing) I would have understood that the meeting should be another day.
Why you should always ask the purpose of the meeting
When starting a company most founders, consultants and freelancers usually accept all kind of meetings if it seems like it is a business opportunity. This is the most reasoning thing, because clients=longer runway. Another posibility with new clients is of course to showcase work which in itself results in new leads/clients and even longer runway.
However as time passes and client number grows so does our experience too, this gets us to understand value of the time and that we should be more selective of what where we spend the time on. Understanding the reasons behind each meeting request could accelarate your company growth for many reasons, but here are three.
1. Many times there be no reason for a meeting
The world looks differently nowadays from how it was before 2020. People preferred then so much more meetings in person and if you had to go to them it meant even more time that you had to put in. Luckily nowadays videocall meetings are popular and save a lot of time for many because you can jump on a call with them very fast.
However from time to time it can happen that someone want’s to book a call for something that you can answer right away in the phonecall or email them more info during/after the call. In the long run it can save you tons of valuable time.
2. Low chance of miscommuncation
Let’s face it there could be so many reasons for miscommunication and that is why you should always confirm the purpose no matter what type of meeting it is. My ‘lesson learned’ from above was the perfect example for this. Depending on what kind of needs they have it could be that you need to reschedule because you need more time to prepare or that they expect to get something that isn’t possible before the project starts.
3. You will be even more prepared
It may be that the lead have more needs, something else they are not telling you or maybe they just forgot and by you asking they remember it.
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