The "Great Meeting" Trap

When you’re pitching your startup, don’t tell me about the big-name companies you’ve “had a great meeting with” - I don’t care. Worse, talking about those meetings makes you seem desperate or naive.

? In sales you have to qualify opportunities. Even the word “opportunity” means it’s already been fairly well qualified: it’s been filtered down from Lead to MQL to SQL, and then ultimately to Opportunity.

? When you say “I had a great meeting with XYZ, the biggest company in our industry!”, what you want me to think is that there’s an opportunity there. Usually, though, it’s not even an SQL. Here’s why VCs discount the “great meeting” message:

?? i) when you have only a few leads, you meet with anybody, qualified or not.

?? ii) the person you met with at that big company could be your cousin; or your grade-school friend; or your cousin’s grade-school friend. It’s great that you’re working your network, but it doesn’t give any signal about whether that company values your product.

?? iii) whatever they actually told you in the meeting, you probably heard it with “happy ears.” I borrowed that phrasing from Pedram Mokrian - he uses it to describe a type of confirmation bias where you love your product so much that you fail to hear when others don’t love it the same way. (To be fair, there is a balance here - you have to believe in yourself and persevere through people saying “no.” At the same time, if you hear it enough times, be open to the possibility that your product isn’t actually all that.)

Also, here’s a risk you may not realize: if you name a brand-name company you’ve just met with, every time we meet in the future I’m going to ask whether you’ve closed them yet. The common reply is, “oh yeah that didn’t go anywhere, blah blah excuse blah blah.” Followed by “Ah but this week I had a great meeting with this other company!” Sigh.

? Ok, but what if Apple really does love your product, and there really is a qualified opportunity there? In that case, don’t tell me that you “had a great meeting,” because that’s what everybody else is saying. Instead, tell me specifics about how you qualified the opportunity and why I should trust your version of what the customer said. Also, crucially, you will have to offer the customer up as a reference, provided our conversations go that far.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have meetings with prospective customers - of course you should, as many and as often as possible. And you can work into your pitch the fact that you’ve talked to a few dozen prospects, that their level of interest was extremely high, and a few things you learned from your customer discovery.

By the way, if you’re early, it’s ok that you don’t have traction yet. Every company that made it big, if you go back far enough in time, was where you are now. Just don’t pretend you have traction just because someone with a fancy title at a fancy company let you book an hour on their calendar - that’s not how that works.