Last-minute preparation

– You’ve prepped for your meeting for weeks, the day’s finally here. You’ve just gotten off the airplane or the drive. You’ve walked up, you’re in the lobby of her building. It’s time to mentally prepare. Every great athlete, performer, musician, anyone who performs at the highest level has a pre-game ritual, and you should have one too. You want to put yourself in a situation where you have the appropriate mindset to maximize all of the hard work that you’ve done getting up to now. So, I like to start by visualizing what I want to happen in this meeting, literally. And I run through it in my mind. I want to think about what might she say when I say what I’m going to say? How do I think about my objection handling? I want to flip through, in my mind, all the examples I may want to use of customers like her that have already achieved the benefits that she wants to achieve. I want to think about, literally, anything that might come up that could derail the meeting and I want to remind myself that I know these answers, and that I’m ready to give them in a way that will make her feel confident in my ability to solve her problems. Next, I want to take a minute and just be compassionate about her. Compassion is when you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and you try to think about what the world looks like through her eyes. What’s she doing right now? I’m one meeting out of a long list of meetings. This is not, she did not wake up this morning and say, “I’m so excited to meet with Mike, “this is going to be an amazing sales presentation.” My guess is she didn’t say that, even though that’s what I was thinking about my day. So, recognize that you have a gap in your run-up to this moment. What’s she doing right now? Is she in a meeting with her CEO? Is she running from one thing to another? Is she answering emails? Just put yourself in that context, so that, when you meet physically, you can meet mentally. And, lastly, as you’re taking those final steps into the lobby, you’re pressing the elevator button, and you’re going up, remember to just relax. You’ve been here 100 times before. You want to put her at ease and she will be consciously and unconsciously resonating with your body language and your energy. If you walk in and you’re over-caffeinated and you’re jittery, and you’re shuffling all of the things around on your desk in front of her, that’s going to put her into a mental state that is not conducive for your forward progress. So, just take a deep breath, remember that you’re going to kill this, and get up that elevator.