June 14, 2018 | less than a minute read

Pre-framing - The art of warming up your sales meetings

Get in touch

Freddy Dobinson

Head of Client Experience

Get in touch

Freddy Dobinson

Head of Client Experience

Pre-framing is an influence tool that allows you to shape someone's thought process about an event or topic before addressing it.

Adopting this tactic puts you in control of the conversation which is essential when selling.

If you are meeting someone for the first time, an effective pre-frame will enable you to:

align meeting expectations
eliminate doubts, objections, and hesitations
demonstrate value-add and subject-matter expertise

One way to successfully execute the pre-frame is to leverage a relevant piece of content ahead of the meeting.

To do this:

Determine the pain point and business challenge that your are expecting to address with your product/solution (if you cannot do this, then you are probably walking into the wrong meeting)
Find a piece a piece of content relevant to this challenge
Share the insight and provide additional context personalised to the business and meeting participants

For many people, when they are faced with something new or something that makes them feel uncertain or uncomfortable, their initial reaction will be to reject whatever has triggered that feeling. By letting people know in advance what to look for in your message you are paving the way for your message to be well received. A well done pre-frame can eliminate potential doubts, objections, hesitations, disagreements, etc. With a pre-frame you are giving yourself the advantage of handling challenges while they are small or even non-existent.