First impressions | Laura Meyer

And so how to get started. A lot of this I know is going to seem really obvious, but it's incredible, and I attribute my background in events and marketing. I do a ton of organization. I do a ton of detail work, and if you don't get that right, I've seen so many things crash and burn without that being really sharp and paying attention to it. So the first thing I have— I'll just tell you the 6 first and then I'll go through them individually. Research and personalization. The best thing you can do to make that first impression is know everything about your potential customer. Warm intros. This is obvious and hopefully you would have a bunch of these here. There's a lot of ways and techniques I use to get those. Opening email and follow-up. I have some tips on that. Facts and data, you must include that in your opening and make sure you really harp on those to show why they should even spend a second, A, reading that email, or B, considering a call or meeting. Examples and use cases, and then meeting people at events. The first thing I did, I just did a quick word cloud of all the reading I do. I spend at least an hour a day on Apple. Sometimes it's a few hours. I study it constantly. And that could be between my Google Alerts, between Twitter, between— I have some analysts up there. I have all the major blogs. I have some internal IBM resources. And it's exhausting. And I do it nonstop because you don't wanna miss anything. You don't want anything in the news. And that's how you remain relevant. build that relationship, that it's worth their time to spend with you. You should know that. And so a lot of the questions you might have in a meeting, that's what you would fill in. The next thing, warm intros. This is really simple. It's very basic. I use LinkedIn, Twitter, and email. I know some of you would likely be able to find ways to use Snapchat, Instagram and other social media accounts, Facebook. I find at the level that I want to meet at, it's much faster just to go this route. But hopefully you could share one day maybe with me a better route on some of those other technologies. As for the intro, ghostwrite a note. Include a 2 to 3 sentence blurb. I can't tell you how much time is spent when I have a seller come to me and says, hey, I have this idea for Apple. Okay. Can you write an intro for me? Okay. Then I'll craft something. And so you could cut all of that out. So if you have some great person that could intro you and you found it on LinkedIn or someone's mentioned that to you, the fastest way is to ghostwrite that note for them and include your blurb for you. And so then it will happen usually pretty quickly. And then if you hear nothing, you just follow up. If you've— I do it probably every 2 weeks. Sometimes every week if it's really crazy time of year and I know that. But it's really good to be persistent and in a friendly manner. And one technique that's worked really well for me is I will write, hey, can you just tell me if this isn't interesting to you and then I'll leave you alone? One of the key things is making sure you make them happy and you're not pinging them aggressively. So that's one way to give them an out. To— if they're not interested. And then it won't waste your time. And then hear from a target person. Respond really quickly. Move friend to BCC so they're not involved in any of that organization. And then suggest a window of time and offer to go to them. And then meet. If there's a specific agenda, send it ahead of time. Opening email and follow-up. This stuff once again, is something I'm sure you've learned before, but I send maybe 6-sentence emails all the time, and they're effective, and they're usually cold. So I do send a lot of cold emails to people at Apple, and it's focused on who are you, why are you contacting them, connect the why for the body, how it's interesting to them or their business, and then what can you meet or speak to on the phone for 15 to 30 minutes? Sometimes I'll ask for an in-person, but I try to make it really short, and then I capitalize on that short time really fast. If I have someone in another room, there's a lot of prep work that goes into that to make sure I'm respectful of their time. Facts and data. Anything you are building, make sure to make it a numbers game. There's a lot of things you could do in terms of if you're testing, anything you could do to show how it might impact their business. That's really key. If you can share customer stories, algorithms, clearly you don't want to share your secret sauce, but if there's something compelling you've done differently, definitely highlight that. Go through techniques, architecture, and insights. Then examples. One of the hardest things with enterprise customers is you want to say, hey, I've done all this cool stuff with these other companies, and I can't tell you how many times my use cases have been totally ignored or frustrated— people have been frustrated by them. The reason being is they want something in the same industry. So if you're selling to someone in technology, keep it in tech. If someone's in education, those things are obvious, but sometimes you might have those use cases. So what do you do? You have to communicate in a way that's relevant to them. Is it a competitor? A lot of times these large companies don't want to hear how great you've been doing at another company. And so that's something that's really kicked my butt in the past, and you really need to be careful of that. Is it the same scale? I can't tell you how many times— now that I've been with Apple a long time, their scale is huge. The things that they're running, their sites, everything they're doing, it's massive. So you need to be able to have the same scale in what you're talking about. If it's going to be small, then break it out for them, and that's it. And then does the company have a similar infrastructure? That's just the behind-the-scenes part, which you can know over time spending time with a customer. And then I'll end this section with this: meeting at events. It is so hard to meet at events and not seem crazy. I've done a lot of stalking in my life as I changed a lot of careers, and it's something you got to do. You really got to be prepared for that 2 minutes, and I'm sure a lot of you have run up to people or right after they speak and said, hey, give me 2 minutes, and you go through your spiel. And how do you do it right? This is my opinion. Have those target lists and have a 2 to 3 business goal. Events can be exhausting. And fortunately, that's not a part of my job too much. But if you were going to pitch something, focus on 2 to 3 people. You don't need 10 people. That means 10 emails to follow up, and they might not be a good use of your time. Get your pitch down. Make it really short. Nothing's worse than a poor speaker going way over time, and then you've hogged all the time and no one else— there's a whole line behind you. Offer something. There's ways you can offer. You'd be surprised if you did a little research on what they're interested in, maybe what they're writing about, maybe their Medium posts, any of that. That's always a good way to go. And then make it an easy next step. A lot of people don't want to meet for coffee anymore. They don't have time. So if you can do a quick call or just send them an email, that's a win if they follow up with you. I'm going to stop there. So getting the first impression done. Any questions? Pretty self-explanatory, right? Okay, good. Running the meetings. This is huge. You have to be your team lead. And if you're a team lead of one, that's okay. Make sure you organize yourself. And rehearse. What this means is quite obvious, but let's say you have a demo. You need a plan B, C, D if that demo doesn't work. I've seen that happen, and that's embarrassing. If that's screenshots, if that's anything you can do to make that happen, and then you need to be organized as the order, who's speaking, who's doing what. When you're navigating, right now I have a team maybe of 20 people that come in. At different points. It's so easy for these details to get lost. Who's on point for each part? And it's just really, really important. And mistakes happen all the time. Even people with 30 years of experience, I've seen it. And that goes into plan for plan B, C, and D. Like I said, there are dongles that are forgotten. There are issues with your hardware. Maybe you have Batteries or that. You name it, it happens. You have to be prepared for that. You could print out your deck. You could do a bunch of different things to help with that. I would recommend coming up with that. Research. Once again, a lot of the time that I'm spending researching on Apple is actually on the people in the room. There's no information. Everyone has scraped their LinkedIn files. So you have to be a bit creative in figuring out what they do, what they're interested in, and not every client's the same way. And so if you were meeting with Facebook, you might find that they have a whole Twitter presence, Snapchat, all these things. I would gather that and make it interesting to them because they're in meetings like this all day. And also, it helps you with the curveball. People are very technical. Let's say I'm meeting with someone in line of business. So often, that person will dive very deep very quickly, and I don't have the same background as people that are technical architects. While I spend a lot of time reading and researching, I wouldn't be able to tell everything on how it's built. This is why I'd partner with someone like Alyssa and make sure they're in the room. Knowing the people in the room will help with that. Confirm the agenda. This is the quickest way to make sure you're on point, and it's so obvious. But a lot of times I have meetings where I have no idea if I'm going to be on mark. Let's say I pitch something and they said, okay, maybe that's interesting. I have no idea if it's something they're working on. No idea. They could just be looking at it because it's something of interest for the time being. So confirm it with them. They'll tell you then. It's the easiest way for you to get feedback. Have preplanned questions. One of the key things is that you need to know their budget timeline, their project timeline, all of these things. And these details are really important, and unless you've asked them or appointed someone to ask them, they never get asked. I can't tell you how many times I've come in and said, don't forget. I say to myself, unless I've written it down and really said it in a way, they don't want to share anything. I mean, there are companies that are really private, and they are all under NDA, and all these things that are being built They're not here to share their story to you so that you can be better at your job to sell your product and help you succeed. It's your job to really— and so those questions really get down to finding out their timeline, finding out their budget, what are their long-term goals, and that's the easiest way to get those answers. An understanding of clients' challenges. Another thing that really helps is when you start off your presentation with an understanding of clients' challenges. I might make these up. Majority of the time by now, I would have these down pat. I know that this department's having these issues, and I think this can help in this manner. You could do reading on, let's say, Let's say you wanted to pitch something to Uber on their new cars that are out in Pittsburgh. And you had an idea for them. And you thought, hey, I think you might have these 3 challenges. Could you go through these for me? And then they say, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's a problem of ours. No, that's not. It's not always going to be the case. Maybe they say, yeah, that's fine. But at least get you to the point of where you're having that conversation. Listen and pivot. You have to be listening and reading the room. I've had it where it's been probably 90% of the time we're talking and maybe 5 or 10%, probably 10 in this scenario, but small part the customer's talking and that's horrible. It is so awful and embarrassing. And it's a hard thing is you're so excited about your technology. You're so excited about how you can help and solve problems. And you got the chance. There's so many times where people I bring in, they are so excited to fly out here and talk to Apple and be in the Bay Area. It's a huge achievement for them. And so that adrenaline goes, and then they're talking too much. And it's a huge challenge. So you have to either cut off or say— you could ask questions like, is this resonating with you? How does this sound to you? So the more you get the customer talking, the better it is. Know their buying timeline. There are really short windows where things have to be submitted to IT. A lot of departments work where if they're adopting technology, their line of business is going to have to submit it to IT for approval to make sure things get integrated. If you're out of that window, you might have to wait another 6 months. Why that matters is it sucks. If you're on quota, for me it sucks, but if you're in your situation and you're long-term growth and success of your company, you might not have capital for 6 months. So you need to know that and be in that window. And if you're in that window, go. Move very quickly. And then always have next steps. Next steps are really important. And it could be a proof of concept. It could be a technical deep dive. But have it, what you want. And they'll tell you whether or not. But if you don't have that ask, then all of a sudden you risk Not getting it. And they're not going to give you more than, than you asked for.