You will run a full practice first meeting with a partner and review it against a checklist.
Most people who sell have never heard themselves do it. They know roughly how their meetings go, but memory is generous. You remember the good question you asked and forget the four minutes you spent explaining a feature nobody asked about. A recording is not generous, which is why it is the fastest way to improve.
In this exercise you will run a full practice first meeting with a partner, record it, and review it against a five-point checklist. It takes about forty minutes: ten to prepare, fifteen to twenty for the meeting, and fifteen to review. You need a partner, a quiet room or a video call, and a phone or laptop that can record.
Your partner plays the buyer, so they need something to work from. Write them a short brief, half a page at most, with three things in it.
The first is who they are: age, job, and a line of background. The second is a real problem your product could help with, described in their words. The third is one hidden concern: something the buyer is worried about but will not mention unless the seller asks the right question or creates enough trust to bring it out. It should be one of the four from lesson 5.2: price, trust, timing or someone else who needs to agree.
Give your partner the brief and keep a copy for yourself, but fold it so you cannot see the hidden concern. Better still, ask your partner to write their own hidden concern on a sticky note and keep it until the review.
Here is a worked example. Rachel sells a monthly meal-prep subscription. Her brief for her partner says: "You are Daniel, 32, a project manager in a logistics firm at Changi. You and your wife both work late and end up ordering food delivery most nights. You want to eat better and spend less, but you've tried cooking on Sundays and it never lasts past the second week." Daniel's hidden concern, on the sticky note, is that his wife thinks subscriptions are a waste of money and he would need her to agree.
Ask your partner's permission to record before you start, and say it out loud at the beginning of the recording so it is captured. Then run the meeting using the shape from lesson 5.1, The shape of a good first meeting: agree the agenda, ask about their situation, check the fit honestly, and agree a next step.
Ask your partner to stay in character and to answer the way a real buyer would. They should not volunteer the hidden concern. If you ask a question that gets near it, or if they feel comfortable enough with you, they can let it come out naturally, the way a real buyer might.
Try not to pause the role-play to ask "was that right?" If you lose your place, recover the way you would with a real buyer. A practice call that keeps stopping teaches you less than one that runs badly all the way through.
Once you have finished, listen back to the full recording with your partner. Do not skip ahead. Score each point as done, partly done or missed, and note the minute in the recording where you heard it.
Agenda agreed: you stated the time, the purpose, asked permission to ask questions and asked what they wanted to cover. Open questions: most of your questions began with what, how or tell me about, and you followed up on the buyer's words. Summary: before moving to your product, you played back what you heard and let the buyer correct it. Fit check: you said clearly what you could help with and what you could not. Next step: the meeting ended with an action, an owner and a date, as in lesson 5.3.
In Rachel's recording, the agenda took ninety seconds and was clean. Her questions were open for the first five minutes, then turned closed once she got nervous: "So you'd be interested in the four-meal plan?" She skipped the summary entirely. Her fit check was honest, she said the plan would not help with lunches at work. Her next step was "I'll send you the menu." No date. She scored two done, one partly done and two missed.
Now your partner reveals the sticky note. Did the concern come up in the meeting? If it did, note what made it surface. If it did not, go back through the recording and look for the moment it nearly did.
There is almost always one. In Rachel's call, at minute nine, Daniel said, "I'd have to see what my wife thinks about the menu." Rachel heard "menu" and offered to send it. She missed "my wife thinks." A follow-up like "What do you think she'd want to know?" might have opened the whole conversation.
Finding that moment is the most useful part of the review, because it shows you exactly what you missed and what you could have asked instead. Ask your partner too. They will often say, "You were close when you asked about budget, I nearly told you then."
At the end you should have a recording, a five-point score with minute marks, the hidden concern and the point where it came up or could have, and a list of things you noticed. That list will probably be long, which is normal for a first recording and nothing to worry about. Write your partner's brief tonight, book forty minutes with them this week while module 5 is fresh, and then work through the activity below.
Run and record the practice call, score it on the five-point checklist, and write the one thing you will change next time.
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