The Meeting You Should Worry About Most Is The One You Never Attend
“Why should we go with them?”
The question comes an hour after you’ve left the building.
The woman you spoke to is now sitting at a table with the CEO, the CFO and two other managers.
They all look at her.
“Well…”
She clears her throat.
For a second, she can almost see your pitch deck.
Slide 12.
Or was it 17?
The one with the three boxes.
Something about seamless.
Scalable.
End-to-end.
Shit.
Your 47 polished slides have collapsed into a handful of half-remembered words.
A phone lights up beside one of the managers.
Ping.
A quick glance down.
The other manager leans back, arms folded.
“Because…”
She reaches for the clever line you repeated several times.
Nothing.
Another ping.
This time from the CFO’s laptop.
The CFO starts typing.
“I’ll send you the numbers after this.”
The room is already beginning to move on.
Then the typing stops.
The CFO looks up and studies her for a second.
“So why them?”
She looks down at her notes.
The words sounded great an hour ago.
Now they barely make sense.
A neat little phrase.
Three bullets.
An arrow pointing to something called “awareness” and “value creation.”
None of it tells her what to say next.
“Well…”
She can feel the CEO staring at her, waiting.
Another ten seconds crawl by.
It feels like twenty.
The silence is starting to answer for her.
You had weeks to prepare, hours of research and endless rewrites.
She has half a page of notes, four pairs of eyes and one chance to pull it together.
Suddenly, your deal depends on someone else.
Someone who never wrote the pitch, never rehearsed it and never expected to have to sell it.
OK, maybe that exact meeting never happened.
But some version of it happens every day.
Sooner or later, your message has to travel without you. And once it does, you no longer control the words.
That is why I found myself going back to Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing The Chasm for the fifth time.
Because beneath all the talk of technology, markets and adoption, there is a very human truth.
Great products do not travel through logic alone.
They spread through conversation.
And that only works when the message is easy to grab, easy to repeat and easy to defend.
People rarely make a business decision in isolation.
They look to people in their own world.
Lawyers talk to lawyers.
Engineers talk to engineers.
CFOs talk to CFOs.
They ask what worked, who else chose it and whether it’s worth the risk.
Your context.
Your explanation.
Your carefully polished slides.
For word of mouth to work, what survives has to be worth passing on.
When a deal stalls, we tend to blame sales.
Train the team.
Rewrite the script.
Push harder.
But perhaps sales is only where the problem shows up.
Go upstream.
Maybe the problem started before sales ever got involved.
This is where even strong products get into trouble.
Features.
Capabilities.
Methodology.
Architecture.
Acronyms on top of acronyms.
By the time the meeting with you ends, the person across the table has a bucket of facts but no clue what matters most.
Then the door closes behind you.
She walks into the next meeting, and you expect her to remember it all, make sense of it and sell the idea to someone else?
Good luck with that.
Nobody repeats a brochure. People repeat sharp ideas.
Stop asking only:
“Does the person across the table get what we do?”
Ask:
“Can she get everyone else to get it?”
Because if she can’t, the deal quietly dies in the back channel.
The more complex the product gets, the simpler the message must become.
Your message has three jobs.
It has to land.
It has to travel.
Most companies obsess over the first.
A few manage the second.
The third gets tested in the meeting after yours.
And you won’t be there.
PS. If you don’t know jewellery, know your jeweller. That’s Buffett’s rule. It’s the same with messaging. Smart ideas die in boring words. If you don’t know the game, find a partner who does, because your reputation is on the line. I help thinkers, rebels, and disruptors say what they mean and make it stick. Step up. Bring your message. I’ll bring the punch. You’ve got one shot to say it right. I’ll help you take it.