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A Lot Can Happen In 68 Minutes

What makes a good first meeting between business adviser and client? An article by Jim McLauglin based on his experience of working with Business Link.

 

Introduction

Most clients have their business development needs assessed on first meeting with a business adviser, so this is an important area for local operators of the Business Link service to focus on. Whilst systematic frameworks and methodologies may help, the prime driver of quality is the approach of the adviser sitting in front of the client. The style and approach of the adviser is key to determining what needs are described and the client’s likelihood to move into activities to meet them.

The Background to the article

This article is based on an analysis of 41 first diagnostic meetings by 17 advisers working in one of the highest performing local operators of the Business Link service (in terms of customer satisfaction). The meetings were the first part of a process designed on the DUBS Growth Model (Performance, Potential and Growth Projects - developed by Professor Alan Gibb). DUBS was selected because it was structured and flexible enough to be deployed in many situations. The first meeting was seen as an opportunity to see if there was any more diagnostic work needed and to earn the permission to proceed to the next stage.

The process was part of an innovative development programme comprising:

The advisers consisted of nine generalists who had 26 meetings between them and eight workforce development specialists who had 15 meetings between them.

Whilst the data comes largely from one Business Link area, my work with some 350 advisers from 20 local operators of the Business Link service plus research among the customers of five, leads me to believe that they are reasonably representative of the issues and of the distinctions between effective and ineffective meetings.

This article sets out to analyse what actually happened in those 41 observed meetings and to make some distinctions about what works well and what works less well.

What are the criteria for good first meetings?

An effective meeting can only really be judged some time after the event, when the intended actions have been completed (or otherwise) and there has been sufficient time for them to yield results. However, I needed to have some notion in my mind about what a good first meeting was. Here are some of the criteria I used:

  1. Breadth
    Was the meeting wide-ranging enough to uncover the major needs and check for problems in the key functions?
  2. Depth
    Did the adviser use deeper questions when a topic merited it and develop a view of causes?
  3. Data Sufficiency
    Was the adviser soliciting factual performance and market data to supplement opinions and self assessment by the client?
  4. Quality of Questions
    Were the questions penetrating when they needed to be? Were they phrased and sequenced effectively?
  5. Engagement
    To what extent was the client engaged? Demonstrated by:
    • Active participation in the conversation, speculating (rather than just imparting information), asking the adviser questions, expressions of enthusiasm and tone of voice.
  6. Actions
    To what extent were actions described in SMART terms?
    • What firm verbal agreements were made?
    • How enthusiastic was the client about these agreements (indicated by the client adding or modifying details and by tone of voice)?
  7. Reported Satisfaction
    It was customary for the client either to volunteer or be asked:
    • Whether they were happy with the meeting
    • To what extent
      were they?

I have deliberately sought to focus on meetings and not on advisers. This is because there are some advisers who had three excellent meetings. Most had a mixture and only a few had mostly ‘satisfactory’ or ‘not good’. The individual adviser is an important determinant of diagnostic success but most advisers showed they could do this task well, if not always consistently.

Met all criteria for a good meeting - 9
Met more than half the criteria - 28
Met fewer than half the criteria - 4

The reasons many more of the meetings did not meet all of the criteria were, in priority order: data sufficiency, depth and engagement (particularly commitment to action). I have analysed what happened and reflected on what was successful/not successful and will present the analysis in a chronological order.

1. Preparation for the meeting

There were three data sources that heavily influenced the ensuing diagnostic conversation:

  1. The information on hand-over. Often, this became an expression of need such as “Wants to talk about knowledge transfer partnership.” This was not always very comprehensive
  2. The data gathered by the adviser before the appointment
  3. The signs the adviser reads as they draw close to the client’s premises; the site gives some clues and the reception or entrance even more.

Advisers begin making meaning well before the meeting. The danger is that the adviser may enter the meeting with their stereotype glasses on, seeking confirmation of their pre-meeting diagnosis.

Preparation by the Adviser

Some advisers showed that, even from websites and financial data, it was possible to build some working hypotheses about the client’s potential strategies and critical issues.

Whilst the professionalism of the advisers was universally high, this is one of the areas where most advisers could still improve. In particular, advisers could ask themselves the following questions:

  1. What is the source of competitive advantage for such a company?
    • Cost (feeding into price or profitability)
    • Knowledge (particularly IPR)
    • Resources (financial, material, machine)
    • Relationships (particularly with channels, partners and influencers)
    • Process efficiency
    • Location
  2. What are the critical success factors for a company like this?
  3. At what do they need to be a) competent and b) excellent (hygiene factors and distinctive capabilities)?

Preparation by the Client

Adviser practice varied greatly in this area. Some asked for no preparation from clients while others asked for much. The reason often cited was “I don’t want to put the client off by asking them to do lots of work” or “I used to ask, but clients often didn’t do it”. However, I observed that those who asked the client to prepare for the meeting in a committed way and were very explicit about what they asked for, ended up having much more effective meetings. Lots of the fact-finding had already happened and some of the key issues were emerging. It also enabled the advisers to assess the financial performance of the business and start to develop lines of questioning about causality. This led to a much deeper level of diagnosis. In the very least, it saved a huge amount of time in the meeting.

2. Managing the meeting

The ability to ‘do’ diagnostics is dependent on the adviser’s ability to draw from the client diagnostic data. In a short period of time, this can be difficult. Thus the diagnostic outcome is critically dependent on the advisory style of the adviser and how that interacts with the client.

Managing the Conversation

Some advisers were excellent at managing the shape and the length of the conversation. Others were less able to do this well. Some of the distinctions that enabled the best people to do this were:

Also important to the structure of the meeting was the tone of voice, rate of speech and contribution length of the adviser.

Structure

Meetings that were structured at the outset worked much better than those that were not. Yet only a minority of the advisers had a tendency to describe a strong structure for the meeting and then move the meeting through it.

The poorer meetings were characterised by a lack of structure. In some cases, small talk merged into titbits about the business which then moved into the topics of the conversation. Here is a representation of the structures of two meetings at either extreme:

Effective:

Ineffective:

How the time was spent

The average amount of time across all of the meetings was 68 minutes. There was little difference between generalist advisers and workforce development advisers. Interestingly, most advisers tended to have meetings of similar length. One person had three meetings that were longer than 90 minutes. Another had three meetings that were
just less than 50 minutes.

Advisers used their time differently. This was one of the hallmarks of effective versus less effective meetings. The following illustrates the main differences:

Setting up: explaining organisations, roles and process
Effective Meeting: 7 minutes
Ineffective Meeting: 2 minutes
Reason Ineffective: Client confused throughout meeting

Fact finding questions & discussion on key points
Effective Meeting: 46 minutes
Ineffective Meeting: 18 minutes
Reason Ineffective: Lack of sequence or depth to questions

Explaining services/selling
Effective Meeting: 16 minutes
Ineffective Meeting: 34 minutes
Reason Ineffective: Pushing products

Agreeing actions
Effective Meeting: 7 minutes
Ineffective Meeting: 2 minutes
Reason Ineffective: Lack of detail. No sense of conviction

Managing the meeting (getting back on track)
Effective Meeting: 3 minutes
Ineffective Meeting: 0 minutes
Reason Ineffective: No helicopter view of the meeting progress.

3. Fact-finding

High quality questions will, to some extent, determine the quality of the analysis. This was a decisive factor in whether a meeting was highly effective or average.

Numbers of questions asked

Some advisers asked three times as many questions as others. Generally, the better the meeting, the more questions were asked. In the top five meetings, there was an average of 52 questions (20 of them major questions). In the five least effective, there was an average of 28 (six of them major and the rest anecdotal or supplementary). The specialists tended to ask more questions than the generalists. This was particularly the case where the adviser was sticking to the template or preferred structure.

Quality of Questions

Throughout the process, I noted the questions which seemed to yield real insight and those that did not yield much at all. Here is a list, drawn from real questions asked across a number of meetings (and slightly tidied-up to make them more universal), together with commentary on why the Ineffective questions didn’t work.

STARTING
Effective: What do you know already about Business Link?
Ineffective: Let me tell you about Business Link.

Effective: Shall we start by listing the things you would like to achieve from this meeting?
Ineffective: What are you hoping to get out of today?


FACT-FINDING & ANALYSIS
Effective: In a nutshell, can you tell me what the business does?
Ineffective: What do you do? - Client has licence to talk at length.

Effective: What are your personal objectives for this business?
What influence do those objectives have on
the future of the business?
Ineffective: What do you want to get out of the business?
What gets you out of bed in the morning? - Unspecific and ambiguous.

Effective: Can you tell me briefly (in bullet-point form) about the key milestones in the development of the business?
Ineffective: Tell me about your business. How did it start? - Solicits a long history that is less useful than understanding the motive forces (opposite).

Effective: What measures do you use to assess the performance of the business?
In a nutshell, what are these measures telling you at the moment?
Ineffective: How do you measure your success?

Effective: How do you plan for the business?
Ineffective: Do you have a business plan?

Effective: Can you give me a run down of the financial performance of the business?
Ineffective: How are you doing financially?

Effective: Can we just list for a moment the main products and services you sell. Which are the most important now? And in the future?
Ineffective: Tell me about your products and services. - Client can start telling adviser anything – descriptions, history, features …

Effective: Can you provide me with a list of your customers and how much business you get from each? - If no, this is diagnostic. After the meeting?
Ineffective: Who are your customers? - Does not ask for the real information. Client could answer: sector or industry, names of companies, job roles.

Effective: Can you explain the staffing structure of the business together with numbers and key names please?
Ineffective: How is the business structured? - Client can describe legal structure or just draw a blank.

Effective: What do you believe are the 3 or 4 most important issues facing this business? Probe.
Ineffective: What problems does the business face?

Effective: What are the main opportunities for the growth for this business?
Ineffective: So what about the future? What do you think are the
prospects for the business? - Vague questions get vague answers.

Effective: What new types of customer are becoming more important to you? How are you addressing their needs?
Ineffective: Who are the customers of the future?


ENDINGS
Effective: Of the services I have described, which appeals most? Why? What about …?
Ineffective: Not asked

Effective: I’d like to develop a first draft of an action plan and send it through to you. Can we just recap the main items you want on there?
(Testing for commitment and priorities)
Ineffective: I’ll draft an action plan and send it through. - Without asking this question, there is lower ownership.

Effective: How likely is it that you will take action on the action plan?
Ineffective: Not discussed. - Most people don’t do half of what they intend.

Effective: Do you have any reservations or questions you would like me to address?
Ineffective: Not asked.

Effective: Is there anything else I can do to assist?
Ineffective: How was that? Did you get everything you wanted?

Developing Good Questions

Here are some of the methods for developing good questions that we worked on during the programme:

1. Think about your questions in advance of the meeting. Brilliant questions will come to you spontaneously. Yet the world’s best prepare their questions carefully in advance as their foundation. McKinsey work in pairs, for instance and always draft an interview guide prior to a diagnostic conversation.

2. Work intensively on the critical issues. To do this, you need to ask:

a. STRATEGY “How can this business become more competitive?” Or
“What is the strategy or possible strategies?” (from: cost advantage, product superiority, process superiority, price leadership, marketing superiority, service superiority, channel superiority)
b. CAPABILITY What capabilities and resources are required to implement these strategies? What does the company need to be good/better at?
How does capacity/skill/equipment need to change?
c. ACTION What specifically would need to happen for them to develop these capabilities or resources?

3. Phrase questions to get precisely the information you want. Lists, reasons, factors, evidence are all good things to ask for and increase both the range of responses and the likelihood that you will get more objective information. See the list above.

4. Challenge the answer – diplomatically. If the person answering the question remains at the same level of awareness before you asked the question, it is unlikely you are adding value to their thinking with the question. Good phrases and words for challenging are:

a. “How do you know?” or “What data do you have to support that?”
b. If I were a sceptic, how would you persuade me to that view? (more evidence)
c. What are the arguments against that? (to decrease positional fixity)
d. Can you see any other ways of achieving that? (to increase flexibility)
e. May I just play devil’s advocate on that topic?

4. Analysis

These were, by and large, first meetings. Much of the time was therefore spent fact finding and understanding the client. On some occasions, the work of generalist advisers led on to further levels of diagnosis, such as a business performance diagnostic or a more structured DUBS Analysis. In the case of workforce development advisers, most of their work led on to further interventions.

The following shows the extent to which the diagnostic agreed with the clients own understanding of their needs and the extent to which the diagnostic brought about a different understanding.

Client has a clear view of their business development needs confirmed by adviser:
Generalists - 13
Workforce development advisers - 6

Adviser confirms self-assessment and uncovers important additional needs:
Generalists - 7
Workforce development advisers - 7

Adviser helps the client to see a different priority:
Generalists - 6
Workforce development advisers - 2

On all but two occasions, the conclusions about priorities for the business were agreed by me and the colleague adviser listening to the tape. There were a couple of occasions where important information was skipped. On both occasions, this was where the adviser was fully immersed in trying to persuade the client of the merits of a service.

When discussing the process, three main dimensions of the diagnostic emerged:

  1. Understanding the client: Capability, motivation, likelihood they will take action, style and approach
  2. Understanding the organisation: Performance, potential, constraints, resources, growth projects, key people, processes
  3. Understanding the marketplace: Potential, trends, structure, customers

Well balanced meetings had key questions for each of the three topics. Some meetings paid too little attention to the entrepreneur’s character and way of working, while others were too internally focused at the expense of the market.

Use of frameworks

Of the 26 meetings conducted by the generalist advisers, 17 were structured using the Durham University Business School Growth Model. I would say that 6 were highly structured around it and the others loosely so.

Among workforce development advisers, about 11 of the meetings were using the Strategic Skills Review framework. Three advisers followed the template very closely (and skillfully). It was not relevant to two who had slightly different roles.

One adviser used rating scales to great effect. He said “I’d like you to give the company a rating for each of these factors (finance, marketing, management, operations).” He then proceeded to probe to understand gaps and potential changes that would have the most impact on scores.

5. Recommendations and action plans

For the purposes of context, here is a description of the clients that advisers worked with:

All advisers made clear recommendations at the end of the first meeting and followed these up in writing. The adviser’s job is to define the need and broker a solution provider or a programme of support. Here is a list of the most commonly recommended services:

INTERVENTION MENTIONED/FREQUENCY
Essential skills review - 19
Funding options review - 18
Modern Apprenticeship or NVQ programme - 16
Business performance diagnostic - 15
Marketing development work (including sales training and promotional strategy) - 14
Knowledge transfer partnership - 10
Investors in People - 8
Manager/management development - 11
R&D grants - 8
Business strategy and planning process - 2

* some clients have more than one service recommended.

Many of the proposed interventions were from pre-packaged programmes of support. This was always done in good faith. However, it did lead, in my opinion, to some needs being neglected because no easy person or programme of support fitted it.

The adviser’s interpretation of the role was a very influential determinant of the process of the meeting. Those advisers who understood the role to be meeting their KPIs, particularly for brokerage, had a tendency to sift for product-need matches. There were two forms of this.

The product parade. This happened on about five occasions. The client, having given some information about their needs, was then given a description of all the services Business Link provide. At worst, the products were not matched to the client’s need or situation.

Products in search of a client. In some meetings, there was an attempt to sell solutions. This happened more often when the advisers became conscious of a shortfall in the uptake of contracted programmes.

Conclusions

The sheer variety of clients – in terms of personality and types of business – makes it very difficult to lay down any hard rules about how a first meeting should be conducted. Here, however, are some conclusions based on these observations:

  1. It would be reasonable to ask some advisers to follow certain protocols such as a meeting template and ensure that they do. Greater degrees of discretion should be won through proof of competence. Handled properly, this would support business advisers, particularly whilst they are making transitions from previous occupations.
  2. Meetings are better when they are not fireside chats but working sessions with a pre-determined structure and preparation by both parties in advance.
  3. Where business advisers are required to broker-in support with high targets for doing so, there is a tendency to filter client needs through the products or services available. This can be dangerous unless there is a strategic portfolio that meets all of the key needs or unless there is sufficient time and space for advisers to put together bespoke packages where the circumstances merit it. Be aware that pressure to meet certain targets can lead to important needs to be neglected in favour of meeting product quotas.
  4. Selection processes need to pay much more attention to the adviser’s abilities in the following areas:
    • Phrasing and precision of questions
    • Ability to sequence questions
    • Management of an agenda in a meeting
    • Strategic options analysis and appraisal.

Advisers are highly skilled and professional. However, there is much they can learn from each other and from reflection about the important basics of understanding client needs. Particularly when working with live data (recordings) and not a fantasy recollection of what happened.

 

About The author

Jim McLaughlin is a keynote speaker and Senior Consultant at The Directors’ Centre, helping growing businesses to grow.
For further information, contact Tricia on 01225 851044. (ty@directorscentre.com) www.directorscentre.com

©2006 Jim McLaughlin, Excellence in Diagnostics

publication details

Published in "Excellence in Diagnostics" by the Business Link University (BLU), a corporate university of the Department of Trade and Industry, March 2006.

 

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