Client Meetings and Pitches

During my time at First Wave Agency, I was very fortunate to be given the chance to have face-to-face time with real life clients. This took place in the form of pitches, individual company meetings and mass project briefings.

One thing I took away from the pitches and meetings was business card etiquette. I had never paid much attention to this before and it was very interesting to see how Singaporeans handle business cards.

A couple of things I noticed were that:

·      You are expected to treat the cards with respect. No one crams the card into their pockets or folds them

·      If given the opportunity, business cards are normally exchanged at the beginning of the meeting as a formality

·      Cards are almost all the time handed over and received with both hands

·      Even though you are giving someone your business card, you still need to introduce yourself by name. This saves them the awkwardness of squinting at the card to look for how to address you

This is a really good (although not exhaustive) link to see how business cards are handled around the world:  http://businesscardsabc.com/business-card-etiquette.html

It was also an eye-opening experience to see how my director approached a pitch or an individual company meeting.

Potential clients are always interested to hear about what other projects you have completed and how this could be beneficial to their project.  This shows me that one’s track record is very important, perhaps even more so when working with Government clients in Singapore.

As many Government organizations work together or at least communicate with each other, it is imperative that a company maintains a good relationship with everyone they work with.

Apart from that, I also learnt that very often, mass project briefings are a good opportunity for networking and also to gain insight on competing firms.  When at such a briefing, you get to see who are the bigger players in the industry and how they conduct themselves and may even be given the chance to talk to them.