What Brings Real Value to Meetings with Clients?

Are you an entrepreneur, startup CEO, small business owner, or marketer who often finds your business meetings frustrating due to a lack of clarity in their value on the boardroom table?  Online or offline business meetings with clients and prospects are a strong foundation for solid brand building for both parties concerned. Whether automated or manually scheduled, any business meeting must be aligned with the purpose and value of both business ventures concerned, especially for client retention and loyalty in a saturated market.

That helps to fulfill business goals for both parties concerned. Whether you are a solopreneur, startup, freelancer, entrepreneur, or marketer, clients are the backbone of your success in the brand-building process and journey. So, don’t shortchange them from bringing relevance and real value to the boardroom table.

Real Valuable Meetings

Real business meetings of value start with a clear purpose in alignment with business goals. However, most people hate meetings. And see them as time-consuming with no value or benefit to business operations and processes. That shouldn’t be especially in the present AI-dominated business landscape, where people are longing for reassurance from human touch and interaction. Focus on how you can make your business meetings more meaningful and valuable.

The starting point is to bring the basic human skills and capabilities of creative and critical thinking, innovative ideas, problem-solving solutions, passion, and drive to the table.  Any mutually scheduled meetings with your prospects demonstrate their trust in you and your trust in them, and fulfilment of the brand promise as clarified in the unique value proposition.

So, don’t let them down by not knowing what to bring to the table. Here is what to master and bring to the table. That will enhance a brand-building mindset in both parties concerned and help your clients and prospects understand their branding and marketing challenges in their entrepreneurial ventures.

Business Context

Most business meetings suck. They shouldn’t, with a meaningful business approach, like believing in brand building for sustainability and longevity in the market. Are you the kind of entrepreneur, creator, and marketer who believes in small talk?  The tech-dominated business landscape has no room for small talk. Actually, there should be no small talk in the boardroom, but ideas and systems analysis.

Learn to focus on both the purpose and value of your own venture and transfer the same understanding of your venture to your client’s venture. Establish rapport through asking questions from their brief and scope that will make you understand their purpose and value. And establish the big picture of what they are pursuing, the challenges in their business operations, processes, branding, and marketing efforts.

Most entrepreneurs have never paused to revisit their purpose, except to make money out of the venture. And neither gives themselves time to reevaluate their value and the value they provide in the market. Make your clients have clarity on these aspects in your meetings.

Identify Problems

You cannot help a client or a prospective without understanding their problems. Understanding their business context and the purpose and value of their entrepreneurial projects will help in understanding their challenges and problems on the brief. 

As a service provider, your duty is to diagnose your client’s entrepreneurial challenges. In branding and marketing, the main challenge most entrepreneurs, including yourself as a freelancer, small business owner, and creator face is identifying and clarifying your client’s problem.  

Do not just present what you do without defining the problem in the context of how it will be a solution to their underlying problem. That makes it easier for them to have clarity of the problems and the value of the solutions in their business operations and processes 

Like in branding and marketing, the context of the problem can be understood by the business idea, concept, model, and whether it is product or service-based. Where is it located? and the target market, whether online or hybrid, will determine the main channels of its marketing strategies.

The best strategy is for you to go to the drawing board to establish a mutual conceptualization of the problems within the business and industry context. This is where you can refer to our data collection tool to clarify the purpose and value of their business venture. That will help the easy diagnosis of challenges and problems. 

Remember, there are many entrepreneurs, creators, startups, and small business owners who do not understand digital marketing and appreciate the brand-building mindset most entrepreneurs should consider for sustainable brand building.

Clarity for Insights

Meetings should be enlightening both to the service provider and the client. It should be a place for exchanging ideas that promote long-term business relationships and the value they leave with all parties concerned. Having clarity in anything, especially as an entrepreneur, makes your venture easy to manage. That helps in defining any entrepreneurial projects you might have lined up for yourself and your clients’ deadlines.

Actually, clarity should come from your first meeting and as clarified in their brief and your own guidelines. With clarity and deep insights into your client’s business venture, you can never go astray with their needs from what you offer. That means you need to ask relevant questions to establish their needs and challenges. 

You have heard stories about how most clients complain about the previous service providers and how they didn’t serve them well. Though gossip, it can be true from how briefs and scopes are handled in client meetings.

All that comes from failing to dig into their business operations and processes. Like in marketing, you might need to assess whether they even understand their marketing needs and whether they believe in the long-term value of brand building. Or they just believe and need quick sales that come and disappear from the market. Deep insights into this would open your client’s mind before you get engaged with them in your offers.

Define Solutions

Without clarity of the business model, needs, and goals, solutions can be hard to design and create for the competitive advantage of your client’s brand identity in the market. In branding and marketing, you don’t get solutions from space, but from the context of identified problems in alignment with industry and business goals.

Once everything is clarified, deep insights into your client’s problems and challenges become easy to design relevant solutions that align with the big picture of your client’s entrepreneurial pursuits based on the purpose and value of their business venture. Business solutions are not just for improving operations and processes, but for standing out, especially in an oversaturated market.

Therefore, from the meeting, you must bring that narrative to stick in their heads and budget, especially in the branding and marketing services. That is why most companies hardly understand the branding and marketing game. Brand marketing is long-term. 

It only yields results from solid brand building. That is why only a few entrepreneurial ventures die before the maturity stage, which is the phase where the business should be more solid and run by established systems with limited hiccups.

Support Systems

Meaningful meetings must have a mutual agreement on how you support each other in making your services easy to operate and manage. The most important support systems are communication and workflow management, timely delivery, and monitoring with zero friction and delays for both parties concerned.

Consider creating a business that runs itself or is managed by buying time and expertise. This approach avoids daily operational headaches. Tech apps and systems like ChatGPT can help automate recurring tasks and capture data. This is perhaps where tech apps and systems like ChatGPT can demonstrate their usefulness and value. But be transparent with clients about using these tools for increased credibility, mutual adoption, and accountability.

Remember, as a service provider, you need to educate and inform your prospects and clients. They don’t know anything about the tools and systems you use.  Be knowledgeable with those recommended to accept and adopt for productivity to maintain relevance in the market. That is why they need you and why you are making money out of your services to them in the light of being of service above self.