It may sound counterintuitive but the Rule number One is to -- "forget about selling".
It does sound a bit weird to have a sales meeting that isn’t about selling, but that's how it should be.
Think about it: you wouldn't just sit down on a first date and start talking about yourself, how great you are, and all the value you could provide a potential partner.
In the same vein, you shouldn't sit down to a meeting with a prospect and start mindlessly droning on about how great your product is.
To succeed at B2B sales in today’s relational landscape, you should be positioning yourself as something more akin to a consultative guide than a prescriptive salesperson.
That means you should be talking less and listening more.
Here's the typical agenda of a first sales meeting:
Introductions (5min)
Sales deck (10min)
Needs analysis (20min)
Identifying use cases (20min)
Next steps (5min)
So how do you conduct your first sales meeting?