Customer Meeting Preparation

Making a customer presentation requires significant planning and coordination.
Your team will need to address the following questions and actions:
- What is the reason for meeting?
- What topics will be discussed?
- What information is required?
- Collect relevant info.
- Analyze information & draw conclusions.
- Organize storyline.
- Integrate materials.
- Iterate and finalize.
- Fine tune presentation.
Commonly missed areas that are critical to success include:
- Agreeing on the agenda with the internal team.
- Agreeing on the agenda with the customer to set expectations prior to the meeting.
- Team members taking ownership of their contributions to the overall deck.
- Incomplete, confusing, or missing Journey Map™
- Providing the deck to the customer 1 day prior to the meeting.
Have a critical customer product development or issue resolution meeting coming up? We’re here to help your team prepare, leveraging the proven techniques and toolkit we’ve developed over decades working with the toughest customers in the most demanding industries.
Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your primary role as a manager is to ensure your team’s success. Internalize this. Make sure your team members know this. Build an environment of trust and collaboration. A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan. Let me tell you the rest of the story.
