I had a phone conference with the Chief Technology Officer of a major international development organisation last night after emailing her on Monday morning for the first time. I assumed that the quick response meant that they needed my help with their collaboration strategy and they knew it. Somehow, that didn’t come out in the meeting. I’ve had a bad cold for the last week so that may excuse my lack of control of the conversation, but only partially.
It started badly with 30 minutes of trying to catch them, which should have showed immediately that there was room for improvement. The late start meant that we jumped straight into business without building up any kind of rapore. I felt more like a hawker than someone trying to help them with their business. I knew another problem going in – that they have their own large IT organisation and would probably feel that they could take care of everything without my help. That gave me only a short time to find their need and convince them that I could help. In the half hour we talked, they gave me plenty of the kind of data I wanted (preplanned questions helped) but I wasn’t able to formulate that into a coherent argument for creating a strategy until a couple of hours after they’d dismissed me.
Worse, I gave them every reason to think that I was unprepared – unfocused introduction, forgot names of key products and listed all potential services rather than focusing on what they could use or saying that I’d come back to them.
Well, all is not lost. They think that it might be worth looking at Asia only at first and will pass my details on to the Asia contact, I can still send them my arguments written coherently, and most of all, I can learn from the experience.