Sales and customers
How to talk to a client’s leadership so they listen to the end
A client’s executives do not ask how your product works; they ask what the company gets from it and how much risk it carries. Open with one sentence about the result, keep it short and in numbers, and answer hard questions directly, even when the answer is “I do not know, I will check”. Leave time for questions, because they show what the executive really cares about.
How to handle this conversation
First sentence about their business
“Over the last six months we cut your order lead time by three days. I want to talk about bringing that to your other sites.”
Three points, not thirty slides
Result, risk, proposal. Leave the details for questions or for the team you work with day to day.
Answer hard questions straight
When you hear “why did this take so long?”, say: “We underestimated the integration. We now run a fixed weekly plan and have hit every deadline for two months.”
Ask for a decision or a sponsor
“What do you need to decide by the end of the month, and who on your side could lead this?”
I am meeting the client’s CEO
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Duration
- 10-15 minutes
The situation
For a year you have worked with the operations team of a large client. Your contact got you twenty minutes with the CEO because you want to extend the work to more sites. The CEO knows the project only from reports and is not sure it pays off. This is the first and maybe the only meeting like this.
Who you talk to
CEO of the client company
Direct, short on time and dislikes presentations. Interrupts when things get technical, asks about costs and delays and checks whether you speak the language of their business.
The counterpart also has private goals and information that are never shown upfront. You discover them only through the conversation, the same way you would in real life.
What makes it hard
- The CEO interrupts mid-sentence and jumps to another question.
- Past delays come up and need to be owned without excuses.
- Time is short, and it is easy to get lost in project details.
Your goals
- Present the result of the work in terms of the client’s business
- Answer hard questions about costs and problems directly
- Leave with a decision, a date or a named person on the client side
What the report looks at
- Whether the first minute was about the client’s result, not your company
- Whether your answers were short and backed by numbers
- How you handled interruptions and hard questions
- Whether the meeting ended with a concrete next step