Six Hours with a Customer
Jun. 26th, 2024 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerTwo Nights in San Diego #3
Leaving a meeting - Wed, 26 Jun 2024, 4pm
Today was the main event I traveled to San Diego for: a six-hour meeting with a major customer. Six hours. When a customer spends that long meeting with you, a vendor, one of two things is true:
I say that primarily because in today's meeting we had to review a number of concepts that we've already explained multiple times. It's like some of the people there haven't been listening. ...Actually I shouldn't say "It's like"; it is the case that some of the them haven't been listening.
Once we left the building my colleagues and I agreed that we should avoid trying to do Zoom/etc. meetings with these folks. They plainly haven't been giving us enough attention during such calls. We saw evidence of that today.... One guy asked the same question multiple times because he was reading something on his phone instead of listening to the answer. Another took another meeting during our meeting. He was on a Teams call, muted, while sitting in a conference room with us. A third guy complained multiple times that we "weren't answering his question", when really the problem was that he kept interrupting us while we were trying to answer it such that we could never finish.
So, being onsite with this customer today was enormously valuable... because too many of our remote meetings in the past have been wastes of our time trying to explain things to people who aren't actually paying attention well enough.
Leaving a meeting - Wed, 26 Jun 2024, 4pm
Today was the main event I traveled to San Diego for: a six-hour meeting with a major customer. Six hours. When a customer spends that long meeting with you, a vendor, one of two things is true:
- You are a key strategic vendor. The customer is willing to dedicate essentially a full workday to meeting with you because your solution is that important.
- The people you're meeting with are bozos. They're able to spend a full day with you because they're not really accountable for anything important. The meeting makes them feel and look important.
I say that primarily because in today's meeting we had to review a number of concepts that we've already explained multiple times. It's like some of the people there haven't been listening. ...Actually I shouldn't say "It's like"; it is the case that some of the them haven't been listening.
Once we left the building my colleagues and I agreed that we should avoid trying to do Zoom/etc. meetings with these folks. They plainly haven't been giving us enough attention during such calls. We saw evidence of that today.... One guy asked the same question multiple times because he was reading something on his phone instead of listening to the answer. Another took another meeting during our meeting. He was on a Teams call, muted, while sitting in a conference room with us. A third guy complained multiple times that we "weren't answering his question", when really the problem was that he kept interrupting us while we were trying to answer it such that we could never finish.
So, being onsite with this customer today was enormously valuable... because too many of our remote meetings in the past have been wastes of our time trying to explain things to people who aren't actually paying attention well enough.
