Client Introductory Meeting & Technical Discussion Script
For Developers
We got to a point in which we as developers need to participate in the pre-sales process. Congratulations to us ✨
It is a huge opportunity to step up our game and learn how to acquire a new client. We need to convince the client in a very short time that we know our stuff and we are as brilliant as we know we are 💪
In order to be fluent and have that sense of confidence, we need to convey clear, concise information in a very short time (a couple of minutes) and paint a picture about ourselves as close as possible to reality in order to convince everyone in the room that we indeed know our stuff. In the majority of cases, this sounds much easier than it is.
In fact, from my experience, we tend to blabber quite a lot, not because we are not knowledgeable in our field but because we tend to do so if we are being put in the spotlight, especially when we need to impress.
In order to get a grip on the entire situation, I recommend creating your very own elevator pitch. This can greatly improve the structure of your thoughts before the client meeting and thus create a sense of control. (It helps a lot especially if you are nervous).
You can create one of those by using the template below:
Intro
You can start by just saying hello.
Ex: Hi everyone, my name is <Name>. It’s a pleasure to meet you all.
Background
Afterwards, you can share a little bit about your background.
Ex: I’m a Android developer and have been working with <Your Company / as a Freelancer> for about <Number> of years.
Some of the clients, could also care about your academic background and you can start something like:
Ex: I’m a computer engineer / software developer for about <Number> of years. My latest studies are a MSc degree in <Software Field>.
Projects:
- Short summary of the domains that the Apps that you’ve worked on are in:
Ex: I’ve worked on Apps spanning from Healthcare to Food Delivery, IoT, Financial tech and others
- List a couple of the Apps that you’ve worked on without explicitly saying their names in descending order (start with the latest one or the one that you are currently working on and go down to the first one). But only talk about the three most relevant and latest Apps that you worked on or are working on right now.
Ex: The latest project / current project that I’m working right now is an IoT Application. Essentially a wearable device that can track your heart rate and communicates with a companion App.
In this section, when talking about the Apps, you need to get a bit technical but not too much. Just enough to highlight your knowledge without going too much into details.
Ex: The App was build using a high level layered architecture package structure. The first layer being Presentation then the Business layer, Services and Data Layer. For the UI layer we’ve used the MVVM architecture with routers and coordinators for handling the navigation. For the Services layer we’ve used the repository pattern for encapsulating the network layer and the local storage.
When describing how you’ve built the app, try to cover everything from UI (Using storyboards/ programmatic UI, SwiftUI/Jetpack compose etc), to the business layer (if you’ve used interesting modules like Bluetooth, HealthKit, Home Automation) to the network layer (if you’ve used a third-party solution or you’ve built the entire network layer from scratch etc). But do it in brief like:
Ex: We have used HealthKit for reading the heart rate. We have used Alamofire for the network layer solution.
Sometimes follow-up questions may arise and if so you can delve into details.
After presenting 2/3 projects and if of course the conversation follows that path, it can be our turn to ask the questions. First and foremost, the goal of the meeting is to find a compatible relationship between ourselves and a client. It is important to understand their needs, their position in their market and of course understand what we are dealing with in terms of the existing codebase or not.
If the project does not exist yet then some discovery sprints may be needed along with a design team/product team in order to design the product. If the project exists then the following questions can help in order to understand better what we are getting ourselves into.
Questions that can be used:
- What is your tech stack? Backend and Client Application
- What tech stack does the client application have? Android? iOS? Hybrid tech? Web?
- In what language does the client App is written? What about the backend?
- What Architecture does the App use?
- What form of dependency injection does the client App use?
- What kind of third-party libraries does it have?
- Does it have any unit tests?
- What kind of a deployment procedure do you guys have?
- What kind of a QA procedure do you guys have?
- Who has ownership of the backend side?
- Who has the ownership of certificates? Access to Google Play/Apple Store? Do we need to take ownership of that?
- What’s the size of the team?
And many more. Depending on your tech stack, I recommend creating a similar list and trying to cover everything that you may need in terms of initial information. This will help you to properly assess if you want to take the project or not.
Take this script as a template or as a get-started guide. Don’t take it as is. Use it as a starting point.
My suggestion is to make one of your own and to make it as real as it can be. You are selling your awesome skills, and how you do it matters more than you think. Your presentation about yourself is your image. You already know that you are awesome, let the rest of the world see it as well 😍
