What I learned to never do in a presentation meeting

Today I had a very bad meeting experience with a gateway provider.

What I learned to never do in a presentation meeting 🧵

I work with a ride sharing company, currently only e-scooters, but we plan to extend the services.

Trying to find a better pricing that fits with the business I got a recommendation with these guys. I search for their website and try to understand if they have what we need.

Tokenized payments with pre authorization and partial capture. On their website they presents a POS payment solution and a very basic solution for e-commerce.

Nothing more about what I was looking for. In the developer documentation was specified more features, but not on the main website. The pricing as well don’t include the online payment solutions.

Because it was a recommendation I send an email presenting myself and ask for more details.

They replied to schedule a meeting first in the morning, 10am (not a big fan of morning meetings). The meeting started, I make a short introduction about the services offered by the business and the use cases.

In this time one dude was not interested at all and felt very bored (probably he doesn’t like morning meetings as well). The other one was more curious about the business than the payment issues that we had to talk about.

I replied to their questions, even if the discussion was far away by the initial subject. But at some point I tried to go back to the initial subject. They mentioned that “it looks you are more technical and know well your needs so what if I have a look over their technical documentation and see if there’s something about what I need”. Then shared the screen with me and showed me some results from the technical documentation and see if may help.

I just felt bored of this meeting and the fact that I just tried to talk about solutions they offer in the first place, pricing and onboarding. They excuse saying that “we’re more into sales and don’t know too much about what you need”

In fact this was strange, because I only asked very basic things that a payment provider sales person needs to know for sure. I wasn’t asking any technical questions.

Fast forward they asked about how the business manage the flow form an accounting perspective because in his opinion we are on a wrong path. In that moment tried to cross sell their marketplace solution, which has nothing to do with our discussion. Saying that the marketplace fix that problem for us. But we are not a marketplace and never will be. I tried to stop the call as soon as possible.

I know that probably this introduction was longer enough, some paragraphs may seems not wrong, but I just tried to cut off to only offer some context.

Lessons I’ve learn from this call:

1. Never spend time of someone else if you don’t try to help or not able to do it
2. Don’t try to fulfill your personal interests about your business partner without mentioning them if he has time to share with you this curiosity.
3. Don’t put your client to check the website for something that you can reply right away. Is your prospect, you got the call so make sure he gets all the answers. That can make a difference between a call and a sale.
4. Is totally fine to say when you don’t know something. But if you don’t know your product and don’t know what you sell, you’re in big troubles.
5. Don’t stop the camera in the middle of the call, then turn it back after few minutes as nothing happens. Is strange.
6. Offer the best solution to your prospect, even if your solution is not the right one.
7. Don’t try to give business advices about something that you agreed you don’t know. Is wrong and is a red flag for the prospect. Try to offer advices about facts that you know, don’t tell them that you don’t think is the right way.
8. Don’t try to sell something that your prospect doesn’t need. Even if you fool him on the moment, but later he’ll find out.
9. Prepare some questions for your prospect, don’t let it to swim in the ocean. In my case I had the questions prepared, but they asked the most of questions unrelated to the topic.
10. Build trust, build credibility, build authority.
11. Don’t let the end of the meeting without a call to action. “Let’s see if you have further questions” is not enough.

Do you have any questions about my little story? I’m here to reply.

Note: is the second time when I write this thread so bonus tip

1. Don’t refresh the browser when you write a thread 😂