Or, how the prospective customer becomes difficult by refusing to participate in a sacred corporate ritual

Over the past year, I have spent an extraordinary amount of time talking to technology vendors as part of a fairly substantial marketing digital transformation project. This has involved more discovery calls, introductory meetings and product demonstrations than I care to remember, and has given me ample opportunity to observe the peculiar customs of people who would like me to buy something.

Some of these conversations have been excellent. Others have tested qualities of patience and diplomacy that I had previously wrongly believed I possessed. A few have been sufficiently absurd that I feel they deserve to be documented, if only so that other buyers might recognise their own experience and feel a little less alone.

Welcome, then, to the diary of a mildly exasperated buyer. I should declare at the outset that I am a CMO, which means I am perfectly capable of inflicting on others some of the practices I am about to criticise. There is a certain mea culpa implicit in this exercise, although I shall endeavour not to let it interfere too much with a perfectly serviceable winge.

I would like to begin with one of my particular favourites: the compulsory five minutes of introductions.

A modest proposal to consume half the meeting

You know the one. Everyone joins the call, exchanges a few pleasantries, establishes that the weather is behaving disappointingly in several locations, and then someone announces, with the reassuring confidence of a person following a well-established procedure: “Why don’t we start with five minutes to introduce each other?”

It sounds so reasonable that objecting would feel almost antisocial. We are, after all, civilised people. Of course we should know whom we are speaking to.

Five minutes, however, is wishful thinking.

The first representative explains their role, how long they have been with the company and the territory they cover. The next adds a little professional background, presumably because their predecessor has established that this is welcome. By the third, we are exploring previous employers, adjacent responsibilities and the circumstances that brought them to their present position.

Nobody wishes to appear less forthcoming than the person before them, so the introductions acquire a momentum of their own. What began as a modest exchange of names gradually becomes a series of monologues nobody listens to.

By the time everyone has finished, we have lost a good fifteen minutes of a thirty-minute meeting. Marvellous; we now have considerably less time to cover the real purpose of the meeting.

The professional autobiography as a courtesy

I appreciate that there is a perfectly respectable intention behind all this. People want to establish a connection, explain why they are present and perhaps reassure the prospective customer that they know what they are talking about. I am not entirely immune to the desire to establish my own credentials.

There are also circumstances in which someone’s experience is directly relevant. If the person explaining a difficult integration has spent years working with the system we use, I would very much like to know that. If a colleague has joined because they understand a particular problem we are trying to solve, their presence requires rather less explanation than that of the fourth person whose role remains a mystery even after they have described it.

What I find harder to understand is why courtesy so frequently requires a chronological account of everyone’s employment.

Almost everything I have just heard could have been discovered with a cursory glance at LinkedIn. More to the point, much of it has no obvious bearing on the conversation we are about to have. I am sure the career move was entirely justified, the previous employer formative and the new opportunity exciting. I would nevertheless be grateful if we could leave some of this material for the memoir.A little preparation before the meeting does not strike me as an unreasonable expectation, and I include myself in that obligation. If I have asked people to give up half an hour of their day, I should at least have made an effort to understand who they are and why we are speaking.

My small and rather unimpressive act of “résistance”

I have therefore developed my own small act of rebellion. When I am particularly pressed for time, I volunteer to introduce myself first, give my name and explain that I am the CMO. I then stop speaking.

I admit that I do this partly out of sheer spite, which is not an especially attractive quality, but also as an attempt to suggest that brevity might be preferable.

The hopeful part of me imagines that everyone will recognise the hint and follow suit. The more experienced part knows that I may simply have created additional time for the next person’s biography.There is, unfortunately, another consequence. My abbreviated contribution often earns me a reputation for being a “difficult customer”. I find that a little unfair, because I am generally quite agreeable until someone makes me sit through fifteen minutes of entirely avoidable introductions. Admittedly, “generally quite agreeable, subject to conditions” is unlikely to be the glowing character reference I would choose for myself, but we must work with the evidence available.

There are things I would be delighted to tell you

The frustrating part is that I am perfectly willing to answer questions about myself when the answers might serve a purpose.

Ask what role I play in the project, which decisions I am responsible for or what I am hoping to achieve. Ask why we are considering a change, what is proving difficult or what I particularly want to understand during the demonstration. If there are several people from my organisation on the call, ask how their responsibilities differ and whose questions we need to make time for.

Those answers might help you decide where to spend the remaining half-hour. They might also explain why someone who appears rather quiet is listening closely to one particular part of the discussion, while the CMO is asking an unreasonable number of questions about another.

I would be delighted to have that conversation. It would allow us to learn something useful about one another while getting on with the business that brought us together.

I am also quite happy to know who everyone is. A name, a relevant responsibility and a brief explanation of why you are joining will usually do the job beautifully. Should your professional history become pertinent later, we can return to it with the added advantage of understanding why it matters.

A small request from the other side of the call

I know that selling technology is not easy. Buyers can be distracted, poorly prepared, internally divided and reluctant to explain what they actually need, sometimes because they have not yet worked it out themselves. I would be astonished if I had never been guilty of at least one of these things, and mildly suspicious of any buyer who claimed otherwise.

That is partly why these meetings matter. We have put time aside to see whether we can make sense of a problem together, and whether your technology might help. There is quite enough uncertainty in that exercise without spending half our time establishing where everyone worked in 2019.

So, by all means, introduce yourselves. I would simply prefer the abridged edition, with the relevant details retained and the supporting volumes available on request.

We have only got half an hour, and I would quite like to spend some of it discussing the technology.