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Develop a roadmap with the customer and all stakeholders showing the pieces of the sales processes that have been started and which ones have been completed. Creating a framework that shows progress and what to expect creates transparency with your customer which leads to better customer outcomes.
Add all the stakeholders to a living document or collaborative meeting note platform and integrate it with your team's CRM (like Salesforce). Your customer should feel like they are a part of the process, whether that be the sales process or ongoing customer partnership.
Keep a history of the progress along the roadmap to closing a deal to drive the deal. Great living roadmaps of all sales processes are essential to closing deals on time - in every sales process the customer controls the gas and you control the brake.
Make sure that a customer meeting never ends with a customer having doubts, questions or uncertainty. Encourage your customer to share any concerns, roadblocks or questions.
Where to from here? When's the next meeting? What should happen between now and then?
There are many different types of customer meetings, so no one template is going to work for everyone. Still, take a look at the template above and you'll see that many of the best practices we listed above are built-in.
Whatever their goal is, make it central to the agenda. Then, keep your agenda concise when possible. When arranging the list, start with general topics and move to more specific ones.
Darian is a General Partner at Gradient Ventures, Google’s new AI-focused venture fund. At 15, Darian interned at eBay as a code tester working on the third version of Sell Your Item. In 2005 he joined Facebook as a Software Engineer reporting to Mark Zuckerberg as one of the company’s first outside hires. After Facebook, Darian studied at the University of California, Berkeley for nearly two years before dropping out to work full-time on startups.
He founded Radius, the leading B2B Customer Data Platform, and served as the company’s CEO for more than seven years, growing the company to more than one hundred employees, raising more than $100MM of venture capital from top tier firms, and serving dozens of Fortune 500 customers. Darian is an early investor in the following companies: Lyft, Lending Club, Carbon Health, Palantir, Osaro, Casetext, Alloy.ai, Loft, and many others.
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