Research the Person

So you’ve got your goal.

You know what the topic of the meeting is what your presentation is about you know exactly what your goal is.

We got to figure out now what messages are going to make the person come to the conclusion we want them to what’s going to make them do what we want.

Now this is what’s really different from speaking to large groups or even medium sized groups because when you’re making a presentation to one person you can really really tailor your messages and what you’re going to talk about to them.

Part of it as we’ll talk about later is by asking them questions and engaging in an actual conversation real dialogue in the meeting.

But part of it is simply doing your homework.

Of course you need to go to their Web site.

You need to check out their LinkedIn profile but you also need to google them.

Look at any news story that’s mentioned this person in the last six months or a year.

Find out where else they’re mentioned what other blogs have they been mentioned in and find out.

The Good The Bad The dirty the ugly the successes.

Find out everything you can about this person so you can really tailor your messages to them.

So that’s a huge part of the success of any one on one presentation is simply knowing more about the person you’re meeting with.

Now if you’ve already talked to this person before you should have a good sense of that.

Ideally you took notes and you’ve entered that into a database somewhere in case you forgot or you meet with a tremendous number of people.

But don’t hop right into your generic presentation.

That’s the beauty of one on one pitches and presentations.

They don’t have to be generic.

It can be highly highly specific to that one person.

So if you’re a politician for example and you’re meeting one on one with someone who has the potential to be a huge donor and you know this person has given millions of dollars to public schools and public school funding is this person’s pet issue you need to come in and really be able to talk perhaps for the entire time about your platform and public schools and perhaps and not talk about your foreign policy and everything you’re gonna do for other infrastructure issues you’ve got to really tailor.

But you can’t do that in the abstract.

So that’s why I need you to spend some time really researching this person trying to find out their hobbies trying to find out the issues they care about the more information you know about the person you’re presenting to the more confidence you’ll have the more ways you can tailor the information you have to that person in a way that’s relevant to them.

So that’s what you’ve got to do right now do some research find out every place this person has been mentioned in the news.

Start to put together a profile of this person.

What is it that this person thinks about is worried about is concerned about has an interest in that overlaps with your area of expertise and what you want to talk about start compiling that right now.

You want to write a big 50 page brief on him but just put as many notes as many facts as you can possibly find on the person in a single sheet of paper or right there on your computer.