Groucho Club Sales Café Ditch the pitch

I ran a Sales Café a few years ago for a small, UK based, technology consultancy to introduce a new social software product to their customers.

The consultancy booked a room for the evening at the Groucho Club – a private members club in London’s Soho.

They invited about 15 of their customers to the evening. Also, in attendance were a few of their marketing and salespeople.

The evening started with a few short talks about the product.

I then introduced the concept of the Knowledge Café and posed the question.

How could you use social tools within your organization to good business purpose and what will be the challenges and barriers to implementation?

A Café then followed to the usual Café recipe and the consultancies’ staff also engaged in the conversations with strict instructions not to be in “sales mode” but to just take part in the conversations.

After the Café, we moved rooms to have dinner and to continue the conversation.

The evening was an effective way of engaging the consultancies’ customers and helping them to think about the opportunities and implications of rolling out the product in their organizations. The dinner at the end of the evening was a not only a way of enticing the customers along for the night but allowed ample opportunity for more sales oriented conversation.