Business meetings: how to assess your business

Before presenting your business at a meeting or a matchmaking event, it is worth knowing what you actually have in your hands. Not out of perfectionism, but for a practical reason: a vague presentation is born of a business poorly understood, and the table notices in seconds.

This article is an assessment script that fits in a week.

Why not to assess it alone

Self-assessment of a business is the least reliable of all. You know the intention behind every decision, and the intention is not visible to the customer.

Choose three assessors with different profiles:

• Someone who understands the subject, with the authority to point out a technical problem.
• Someone impartial, with no link to your company or to competitors.
• Someone with your customer's profile, seeing it for the first time.

Do your own assessment beforehand and compare. The divergences are the useful part.

The seven questions that reveal the business

Answer in writing, one sentence each:

1. What problem do you solve, in the language of whoever has the problem?
2. Who exactly has that problem, and how often?
3. How does that person solve it today, without you?
4. Why would they swap their current solution for yours?
5. What does it cost, and compared with what?
6. What do you not do, and should say clearly?
7. What proof do you have that it works?

Question 3 is the one almost nobody answers. Every customer already has a way of solving the problem, however poor. If you do not know what it is, you do not know what you are competing against.

Question 6 is the one that protects you most. Saying what you do not do avoids the wrong customer and saves time on both sides.

The numbers you need at your fingertips

Three numbers, and nobody should go to a matchmaking event without them:

Price and lead time. A buyer asks both at every table. Having no answer ends the conversation.

Capacity. How many customers or orders you serve per month. A large buyer needs to know that before considering you as a supplier.

A verifiable difference. A number, not an adjective. "I deliver in 15 days while the market delivers in 30" works. "Differentiated service" does not.

Market research without hiring anyone

Two cheap and quick sources.

Public reviews of competitors. Recurring complaints are your opportunities. Recurring praise is the standard you have to reach. Read thirty reviews of three competitors and note the patterns.

The matchmaking event itself. In one afternoon, you talk to dozens of companies. It is the cheapest field research there is, and you could not hire an equivalent.

Go with two questions ready:

• "How do you choose a supplier for this kind of service?"
• "What bothers you most about the suppliers you have today?"

Hearing the same answer at several different tables is solid information. Hearing it once is an opinion.

How to turn the assessment into a presentation

The result of the assessment becomes your 90-second pitch, with four parts:

1. The problem you solve, starting with the pain.
2. What you do, in plain language.
3. For whom, with specificity.
4. The ask: what you are looking for in that room.

It also becomes how you fill in the event registration. At events organized with software, the supply and demand fields determine who you sit with. In Rodada de Sucesso, the software brings sellers and buyers together, and the organizer can explain to each participant why they sat with that company. Writing "various services" wastes the whole build; writing the specific offer that came out of your assessment changes who sits in front of you.

See how to present a product or service.

Assessment mistakes

• Assessing with people who like you. A friend praises. A customer tells the truth.
• Confusing an opinion with a pattern. One complaint is chance. Five identical ones are information.
• Assessing the product and not the delivery. Plenty of companies have a good product and a poor process, and the customer does not separate the two.
• Ignoring the price comparison. Price only makes sense compared with the customer's current cost, including the cost of doing nothing.
• Doing it and filing it away. An assessment that does not change what you say at the table was time wasted.

What to do with what you find

Separate the findings into two lists: what can be corrected within a month and what is structural.

What can be corrected within a month, correct before the next event. Response times, presentation material, price list, service description.

What is structural goes into the quarter's plan, and you declare it honestly at the table. Saying "today I handle up to 500 units per month, I am expanding" is better than promising what you cannot deliver. A customer lost through sincerity comes back. A customer lost through a broken promise does not.

Continue with a SWOT analysis before a business meeting, how to build a business plan focused on matchmaking and how to beat the competition.