Managing Large Customer Meetings - Contact Information

Recently, one of my reps was in the midst of working through a very important transaction with a large customer. One day we were both surprised to learn that our key contact had resigned from the company. The resignation revealed the fact that we were single-threaded in the account, exposing us to all sorts of risks. We had been on-site several weeks prior with a large audience of important people and neither one of us had their contact information. That’s a rookie mistake that we should have never made. Here’s a very simple solution for avoiding that situation in the future.

When you are presenting to a large group of people and you want to capture everybody’s contact information the first course of action is to grab their business cards. More often than not, the majority of meeting attendees will forget their cards, so here’s what you do as a backup. Come prepared with a simple print-out of an MS Word table that has these headings: name, title, email address and phone number. Ask them to pass around the sheet and fill in the information.

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I have done this for years and just forgot about it. It’s a great tool and makes sure that you capture everyone’s contact information. Only once has a group refused to fill-in the information. That was fine with me; we were responding to an unsolicited RFP and had not been driving the transaction. In my experience, those situations are rare. But in those accounts where you have (and are building) relationships, there’s nothing wrong with asking for attendee contact information. Most often the customer will oblige.

Sometimes individuals in the company will refuse to provide you with their contact information. That’s fine. As long as you have the majority of the participants providing theirs. At least you’ll have a backup plan for if/when your key contact leaves the company. And, you’ll be able to send a personalized follow up email to every attendee at the meeting. You never know what questions or comments you’ll receive back and what golden nuggets of information that you can gather from attendees other than your key contact.

Go in prepared with a simple table that gathers contact information and lessen the possibility of being hamstrung with a single relationship.