How engaging with C-Levels changed my business meeting attitude

When it comes to purchasing solutions for digital change, the final decision taker often is a “CxO” (CEO, COO, CIO, CFO..). So in my job as a Solution Engineer, I have the enormous privilege to meet these executives on a daily basis and talk to them about how our solutions could help them to accelerate their transformation. To understand the way we can get on the same path, we do so called “discovery meetings”. The objective of these meetings is to find out about the ambitions of the business as well as the agenda of the individual we talk to and what might stand in their way to achieve their goals in terms of process frictions, organisational hurdles or digital barriers. When we do these meetings with rather operational contributors (as opposed to a C-Level), a Solution Engineer would have a catalogue of “discovery questions” and tactics to find out where the shoe pinches. We try to do this by asking directed, but open-ended questions and by actively listening.

However, when it comes to discovery meetings with C-Levels, they usually have their very own agenda for the meeting. While some CxO definitely enjoy answering questions about their business and the ambitions they have set for the coming years, CxO time is valuable and one question usually stands in the room very early in these calls: “What’s in it for me?”. Most CxO I talked to have a clear objective of acquiring knowledge through that discussion and getting answers to questions like: What are common challenges competitors have? How did they solve them? What value and impact on my business could I expect from your solutions? Can you tell me more about a concrete customer example? Do you have KPIs and numbers to share to support this?

Ultimately, you are in a conflict of interest: while your objective was to listen to the challenges and ideas of the C-Level and getting to know as much as possible in the short amount of time, they now expect you to talk through your ideas and references. This means for you that rather than gaining valuable insights from this meeting, you will spend a good amount of your time with your CxO sharing them.

Good negotiation is good collaboration

Now that you have different agendas for this meeting, whether you want it or not, you find yourself in a negotiation. And this is where most people do the mistake. A negotiation is not about convincing the other that you are the biggest, the strongest or the tallest, neither will you win a negotiation by dominating the conversation trying to impress the counterpart. In fact, as FBI negotiator Chriss Voss says, “good negotiation is good collaboration”.

Your tactic is now to make sure you balance the give and get:
When your CxO asks you about a particular topic or a metric, you have two options:

1. Provide an insightful answer with detailed KPI or impact metrics. Highlight the challenges the customer tried to solve or the business metrics they improved and confront your CxO if these metrics or these challenges are relevant to him/her. By doing so, you create a balance of sharing information and gaining insights. While it is much more difficult to navigate this kind of give-and-get-conversation, it often generates much more interesting conversations than asking open-ended questions.
2. You might as well try to understand the purpose of the question before jumping into a customer reference or example that is merely relevant to the CxO. You do not want to end up with a frustrated CxO who may have enjoyed your storytelling but cannot relate to the example at hand. So, when the CxO asks for relevant metrics or examples, try to understand the motivation of the question first. Is there a particular KPI s/he aims to address? Does s/he need an ROI breakdown to get buy-in from other stakeholders? Is there an issue of cost to revenue ratio? How many other projects are there to prioritize? Does s/he try to improve particular KPIs? Which metrics are bound to his/her business goals and his/her agenda? Obvisously, you will then go ahead and share the most relevant example of yours.

Adopt a learner’s attitude

And yes, there are various tactics to engage conversations better, to build rapport and encourage deep dialogue (mirroring, repeating back, asking to precise..) but I encourage you to forget about them. First, when you really engage in the dialogue, ultimately you will build rapport. I feel the best possible way to engage “value dialogue” is to get into the same attitude as your CxO and adopt a learner’s attitude: The “What’s in it for me?”. What can you learn during this conversation for yourself? How does this business model really work? What are the downsides of this supplier model? What are the decision criteria for a C-Level in this type of company?

Often, we try to convince the other we have the right solution at hand and we don’t listen with the intend to reply rather than with the intend to understand (which is obviously wrong). Conversation and dialogue is much more about learning and “when your mouth is open, you cannot learn” (as Buddha already said).

Only because you are the expert on the solutions you can offer to this prospect doesn’t mean the counterpart is not an expert in something. And this is literally the case with every conversation: operational discovery or internal business meeting. Every person is an expert of something and by applying this “learners attitude” to every business meeting, you simply engage better and listen actively.

And this leads me to the next point: you cannot know everything. Neither about the industry, even less about the business of your prospect and therefore, not much more about your solutions fits to their organisation, — just yet. Hence, stay humble and ask when you don’t know something. You are not the expert of their business, they are. And you should really not make any assumptions about what you think to be right or wrong.

Create your own point of view

However, this is an advice that needs to be taken with caution. The CxO acknowledges your humbleness and that s/he can teach you something while you actively listen and try to understand. However, let’s not forget that the CxO talks to you in order to gain insights himself. If there is one thing about CxOs that I learned during trainings and my job: CxOs love courageous people and they even more love convictions! So, once you have passed the credibility test (bravo!), there is one big question you should always be prepared to answer and it is in fact the most important question among all: “What do YOU think?/ What is your point of view?”. And here you cannot stumble and you cannot negotiate either. You are some sort of “challenger”, someone with a novice view on things they do for so long already. So, when you get this kind of question, shoot your point of view. If you are really senior, experienced and knowledgeable about the industry or business world, you might be able to swing this part without preparation. I don’t. I meet CxO from too many different sectors, industries and with different business models. So before joining a call with a CxO, I always have my own point of view prepared. Obviously, you will rarely hit the whole right away. But having a conviction and a point of view on what a customer of this type might face as a challenge and which actions and solutions should be considered to overcome these challenges -even when not 100% shared by your CxO — will get you credibility and will build trust with your CxO. They need to make difficult decisions every day and need people who speak frank to them and while not everything of your pitch might please the CxO, you make a proposition that s/he can react upon and use as a basis for negotiation and decision taking.

Try to “team up” and project

Actually, you might take it a little further here to test the willingness of your counterpart to deepen your business relation and do that project together: once you pitched your conviction and you’ve built trust, try projecting the relationship very concrete “if we were to do this, what would be your time frame? Who would be the project manager? Do you have the ressources ? What would we start with and why? And why now rather than yesterday or tomorrow? This gives you valuable pre-sales information and your “teaming”builds huge rapport with your prospect.

Now that I outlined all the things I learned from engaging with CxOs, how did this impact my attitude towards ‘normal’ business meetings?
Let’s break it down.

What are the lessons learned for my ‘day-to-day’ business meetings:

• Go into every meeting with a learner’s attitude, everyone is an expert in something and you will always learn something — even during a team meeting ;-)
• Always have a conviction (but be open for discussion and different opinions) before attending any call or business meeting. Make up your mind before clicking the “connect” button. Thereby, you start every conversation with an idea that can be overthrown or improved rather than starting with a blank page. This also helps accelerating decision making, bringing structure into your meeting and encourages others to speak up too. This will ultimately create better dialogue than just “brainstorming” or having vague ideas and will bring valuable ideas to life easier and faster.
• Always bring valuable and concrete fact-based examples or statistics into a business meeting that underline the point you are trying to make. A very smart and senior women in my organisation once said to me: when you tend to be emotional — don’t. Decisions will be made based on facts, point.
• Even you prepare all this before your meeting: Listen. And do it with the intend to understand, not to reply! (This is so helpful to keep in mind)

And a little bonus learning from what I shared with you above: When meeting a C-Level internally, I try to have a little value pitch in petto. What can I share as an insight that creates value for the CxO and ideally curiosity to learn more, so I get some valuable talk-time and share my opinion.