Today's tip may be more of a sales tip than a consulting tip, but I have to share it because it was so funny, and so much fun to be part of.

Going into a very important meeting

One day in the middle of the dot-com bubble, the CEO of one of our largest clients called me and my business partner into his office. We knew the news wasn't going to be good going in, so we tried to prepare for the worst. Sure enough, he began telling us of the horrors of the economy, and how he was going to lay off many of his own people, and in regards to us, he was going to have to cut our work in half.

We let him go on until he was finished, and when he seemed to be done saying all he had to say, my partner said exactly the right thing.

What my business partner said

Right at that moment, and without any hesitation my business partner dropped the following on this CEO:

"I hear what you're saying, but you don't need to cut our budget in half -- you need to double it!

Al here is too nice to tell you the horror stories about the people he works with here every day, but I'm not. I don't have to work with them, so I'll tell you what I hear our people saying about some of your staff.

What I hear is that you've got some people here who just aren't getting it, they're not making the transition to the new technologies. They may be good programmers on the AS/400, but when it comes to Java, object-oriented programming, and the internet, they're not getting it. And if you let most of our people go, and all you have left are these people, your business is going to be in a world of hurt."

The CEO's response

Well, needless to say, the CEO was floored. He sat there with an astonished look on his face for quite a while before he could think of something to say. Finally he regained a little composure, and said, "Al, is this true?", and I said, "Yes, it is."

He then asked if I would "name names", and I said no, I would rather not get into that, and I said that he and his programming manager probably knew who wasn't making the grade. Thankfully after a few moments he agreed with that assessment.

Then, he did the most amazing thing I've ever seen a CEO do. In the middle of the dot-com burst, not ten minutes after he was ready to cut our budget in half, he asked, "How much money do we need to budget for you for the rest of the year?"

Fortunately, we were prepared, and we were able to tell him how many of our people we needed to achieve his business goals in the time stated. I don't recall if we doubled our budget exactly or not, but we increased it greatly almost immediately, and continued to work with this client for many more years.

Lessons learned

My lessons learned from this brief meeting -- I'm sure it lasted less than 30 minutes -- are as follows:

• Always be prepared when you go into a meeting. If you don't know what the meeting is about, my motto is always, "Be prepared for the worst, and hope for the best."
• Be firm. Even when the client says he needs to cut your budget in half, you need to be able to say, "No, I think you need to double it, and here's why."
• Along with those first two statements I'll add this: Know how you want the meeting to end, have everything set up for it to end that way, and imagine it ending that way, in success for you. It was a great thing for us to say that our customer needed to double our budget, but then being able to give him very specific cost information about how to solve his business problems provided the power behind the punch.

I'm not proposing this technique of "turning the tables" for every meeting. There probably are times when it's right to have your budget cut in half. But in the end this was easy for us to do because we knew we were right. Except for the people who weren't learning, it was also one of those "win-win" situations: I didn't have to deliver the bad news about the people I had to work with every day, we got more work out of the meeting, and our customer did get their products out to the market.

Facts, features, benefits, proof

Anyone familiar with sales knows that some of our "sales pitch" follows the facts, features, benefits, proof model of selling. This is a very important part of the sales process for consultants, so I'll write more about it in a future article.