First meeting & proposal: planting the B2B marketing seed

It’s utterly unstructured. We introduce ourselves. We ask a lot of questions. We scribble a lot of notes.

What we get out of it:
We try to come away with a good sense of what you do, how you see your biggest challenges and how we can help.

We also look for anything that might make it hard for us to be successful. We’re not right for every company at every stage. It’s best to be honest about that.

What you get out of it:
You get a sense of who we are, what we’re good at, how an engagement with us might look and what you’d get from it.

What we both get out of it:
We get to see if we like each other. If we can picture working together, if we can trust each other. If we share the same ideas about what’s great.

At the end of the meeting, if all goes well, we’ll ask for your permission to move to the next step…

At this point we go home and put together a proposal that reflects the things we’ve learned from you.
Our proposals are fairly short, summarising the challenges, the proposed solution, the process, the deliverables*, timing and budget.

The proposal will probably cover the things we’re about to summarise in Steps 4, 5 and 6.

That’s not because it’s boilerplate, it’s because our methodology has evolved over the years to something that pretty much works every time.

We also throw in some references you can call to get the clients’ view.

* ‘Deliverables’ is a terrible, terrible word that should never be used without a blush or an asterisk. As soon as a better word comes along, we will banish it forever

On to the input stage…