David A. Fields Consulting Group Knock Your Client’s Socks Off! 10 Tips for Your Consulting Firm’s Meetings
Your clients send your consulting firm checks with plenty of digits. In return, you’re likely to conduct at least one meeting during which you present findings, results and/or recommendations.
How do you knock their socks off so they have cold toes they pump your hand enthusiastically, sign up for more of your consulting wizardry and recommend your consulting firm to their friends, neighbors and peers?
Below are ten tips for delivering a dynamite meeting. Actually, you’ll see only nine. I left a spot open for you to fill.
Ten Tips for Dynamite Client Meetings
Know Your Story
Every great presentation is built around a narrative—a message you want to impart.
When you’re crystal clear on your message, you’re more likely to wow your client.
Don’t Bury the Lead
(or the Lede)
Kicking off with a mystery is a tried and true approach… for a speech to a roomful of prospects, not for a presentation to your client as part of a project.
Your story has a punchline—it’s your Aha! or your recommendation or finding.
Lead with the punchline.
Remember Basic Meeting Hygiene
The basics you were taught during your first year of work still apply:
Always create a clear agenda, explicitly call out the purpose of the meeting, start and stop on time, and bring a big plate of cookies if the meeting is in person. (Two plates, please, if I’m attending.)
Start Right-Side Up
Even if you follow all the basics of meeting hygiene, start every meeting with the Right-Side Up Inquiry:
What would make this meeting useful, valuable, and helpful to you?
Most of the time, your client will want you to follow the agenda you suggested ahead of time.
Occasionally something else is on their mind, and following their lead will make your firm a hero.
Interact and Share Ownership
Please don’t stand at the front of the room (or pin yourself on the Zoom/Teams meeting), then drone for two hours.
Make every presentation interactive and invite your client to actively craft the meeting’s final outcome with you.
Even better: invite your client to be part of the results presentation.
Challenge Your Client
If every concept, finding, result, and recommendation you present to your consulting client jibes completely with what they already know, your work may still be perceived as high value.
However, your firm’s halo will glow brighter if you occasionally disagree with your client’s starting position.
The best consultants lead their clients someplace new and surprising.
Connect Personally
A “wow!” meeting is a visceral experience, not an intellectual exercise.
Through personal, individual attention, create an emotional connection between your client, you, your firm, and your message.
Lift Up (Never Lower)
Take every occasion to make your client look good.
Conversely, don’t ever cause anyone to feel like they’ve lost time, money or reputation.
Disagreeing with a client’s premise can add value.
Publicly telling a client in front of their peers that they’re wrong may cost you the client regardless of whether or not you’re right.
Prep for Pushback
Depending on who’s in your meeting, your awesomeness may be met with disbelief, thinly-veiled heckling, disagreement or numbskullery.
Walk into the meeting prepared for these types of responses so that you handle them all with grace.
Otherwise, you’ll find yourself becoming defensive, and that’s not good for business.
What Else?
I created a longer list, but I want input from you. What’s your tip for delivering a dynamite meeting?
Text and images are © 2026 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.
Find out how your client best receives information. One of my CEOs prefers talking through findings versus giving hm the findings to read on his own. It’s more time consuming but the his perceived value spikes when I share information this way. It was a good lesson for me!
Thanks for this very helpful list, David. I would add: don’t be afraid to repeat yourself, judiciously. You’ve been sitting with this information for weeks or months, but people in the room might be encountering it for the first time. State the key points at the beginning, and return to them throughout. People often need to encounter new information multiple times before they truly understand it. In addition to helping them learn, this approach can also prevent friction that arises from misunderstanding, or clients who disagree to save face when they’re confused. Also, people don’t listen nearly as well as you expect them to; occasional repetition is a courtesy to short attention spans and wandering minds.
Share the spotlight. Highlight how the client’s contributions contributed to the success of the project. Show them that/how you’re teaching them to fish so they perceive your partnership with them helped THEM be better in the long run.
First, make sure you score low on the BlahBlameter.
Go Beyond Bullet Points
To add to one of your points, a practice that has worked well for me is before the meeting I make it a point to get around to as many people as possible attending the meeting and greet and briefly chat with them. Solidfying and building relationships one person at a time.