In this brief video recorded at Guangzhou Airport, Zach Selch introduces himself and the setting before recommending the book Business Meetings That Work by Doris Sella, a former colleague. He explains that the book, while applicable to any organization, is especially powerful for sales teams. Selch highlights a key practice from the book—documenting a prospect’s changing state of mind across meetings—as a concrete way to measure rapport and boost meeting productivity. He emphasizes that sales are often won in face‑to‑face meetings, so any method that improves effectiveness is valuable. The video concludes with a reminder of the book’s availability on Amazon and a promotional call to action for Selch’s international sales consulting services.
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Hi, I'm in the Guangzhou Airport in China. It's apparently, I think, the second biggest airport in China. It's a great airport, a little busy, a little spread out. There is a good airport hotel here in the middle called the Pullman, pretty good. And the food, you can get some pretty good food here. There's a Guangzhou restaurant in the terminal Terminal 2, which is a branch of one of the older, more famous Cantonese restaurants in town. Anyway, I want to talk about a book called Business Meetings That Work. It's written by— full disclosure— it's written by a friend and an old colleague of mine who I worked with about 20 years ago. She was in marketing when I was in sales. And it's a really good book. It's about business meetings. I would say it looks like it works better for a sales organization environment rather than a general environment. That's my feeling. But I'm not sure she meant it that way, and I'm not sure that's the only way it could be used, okay? But from a sales meeting perspective, I think it's a very powerful book. And there are a couple of things— what I find interesting with this type of thing is she and I spent some time together 20 years ago. She might have been my boss. She might very well have taught me things that I don't remember that it was her that taught me, or we both learned them from the same people. But there are things that I've been doing for 20 years that she talks about in the book that I'm sure I didn't think of myself. I don't have that kind of imagination. So either she thought them up or we both learned them from the same people, but they're in the book. And one of the types of things is, for instance, thinking about documenting The state of mind of the person you're dealing with and how it changes over the course of subsequent meetings or during the course of the meeting. It's a very, very powerful tool for sort of measuring rapport, if you can imagine doing that as part of your sales process. And that's just one of the little things she talks about. There are a bunch of things. It's not an expensive book. I got it on Amazon. Again, I would highly recommend it. We spend so much of our time in meetings. Anything that's going to help you get a little bit more productivity out of those meetings, in my opinion, is really valuable. And also, we sell through meetings. We sell face-to-face, right? So anything that's going to get you a little bit more effectiveness, a little bit more productivity when you're meeting face-to-face with your customer, in my opinion, is worth it. Remember, Business Meetings That Work by Doris Sella, available on Amazon. Remember, When you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
