Recognize It
Seeing the opportunity inside an account you already own.
You leave with one account, one space, one person.
That is the entire assignment. Not a qualified opportunity. Not a scope. A name you write down and bring to Workshop 2.
Say the objective in the first ninety seconds and do not soften it. The single biggest reason these sessions fail is that people arrive braced for a technical exam. Tell them there is no exam, then prove it by never testing them.
Do not correct anyone in this session. If an AM misidentifies something, take the answer and move. Correction in session one costs you their next three contributions.
What does your client think we sell?
Take ten seconds before you read on. Whatever came to mind, that is the ceiling on every conversation you have with them.
They think we sell rooms. So that is what they ask us for.
Conference rooms. Huddle spaces. A video wall. A quote against a specification somebody else wrote. When a client only ever brings you room questions, it is worth asking who taught them to do that.
- "Can you quote fourteen huddle rooms?"
- "Our conference room mics keep failing."
- "We need signage in the elevator lobby."
- "Send us pricing on the video wall."
- "The lobby embarrasses me when clients walk in."
- "We spend a fortune flying customers here and they leave with nothing."
- "The board keeps asking what this building says about us."
- "We are two years into a capital campaign and nobody has talked to us about technology."
Nobody is hiding the second column from you. It simply never comes up, because the conversation you opened had a shape and they answered inside it.
Ask the room for one real example of a client who asked for something small and turned out to be planning something large. Somebody always has one. Let them tell it. That story does more work than the next four slides.
The gap is origination, not closing.
Central booked more experiential projects in the first half of this year than last, on roughly the same headcount. Revenue moved less, because revenue measures what closed, not whether anyone is fishing.
| Office | H1 2025 | H1 2026 | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| St. Paul | 6 projects · $9.96M | 6 projects · $570K | Same activity, one twentieth the revenue. Revenue is a lagging, lumpy measure of a good half. |
| Kansas City | 5 projects · $10.42M | 5 projects · $422K | The same story again, which makes it a pattern rather than an accident. |
| Milwaukee + Detroit | 0 projects · $0 | 4 projects · $5.2M | Attention arrived. That is the whole variable. |
| Chicago | — | 3 projects · $6,000 | One of the largest corporate markets in the country, effectively unfished. |
These figures come from the XTG H2 plan and the H1 Central lookback. The readings beside them are our analysis, not an endorsed corporate position, and the office numbers have not been reconciled to Power BI. Present them as our read, and say so. Anyone in the room who checks will find you were straight with them.
Seven reasons you have not called us. Some of them are fair.
This is the part of the session where we stop selling. If you have been at AVI-SPL for a while, you have heard a version of this pitch before and did not act on it. Here is our best guess at why, and what we can actually say back.
| What you are thinking | What we can say back |
|---|---|
| "It will cost me commission." | It does not. XTG takes zero commission away from you, and the regional number does not suffer. Your sales manager carries a number too, and an AM who uses us usually expands the wallet rather than splitting it. Fair concern, wrong facts. |
| "My Design Engineer is good at this." | Your DE is good. Your DE also sees one of these every few years. We see them weekly, which is a different thing from being better. This is about repetition, not capability. |
| "I will lose control of my client." | You keep the customer, the relationship and the booking. Your region keeps delivery. We do not take the pen and we do not get between you and your account. Fair concern, and it is on us to keep proving it. |
| "It will slow the deal down." | Earlier does not mean slower. It means fewer laps. Late entry is what forces you to reopen scope, reprice, rebuild the story and compress delivery. The delay you are worried about is the one caused by calling late. |
| "I do not know enough to open the conversation." | Correct, and you do not need to. You need to hear a handful of phrases and say one sentence. This is the honest one, and the whole programme is built around it. |
| "Last time I brought in a specialist team it went nowhere." | Also fair, and it is the reason for the response commitments. Twenty-four hours to an answer. A verdict every Tuesday and Thursday. A decline comes with the reason attached. A fast no is part of the offer, not a failure of it. |
| "My client is not that kind of client." | Maybe not. Hold that thought for twelve minutes. This is the one we are going to test in the next section. |
Read the left column out loud, all seven, before you answer any of them. The room needs to hear its own objections said back accurately by the person doing the asking. If you answer as you go, it turns into a rebuttal and they stop listening.
Then invite an eighth. Somebody will have one you have not thought of, and it is worth more than the seven you prepared.
If you cannot name the shape, you will price the parts.
Every experiential opportunity arrives disguised as something ordinary. There are six disguises, and once you know them you cannot stop seeing them.
Six shapes. Every one of them is already in somebody's territory.
The front door
The room where they bring customers
The story building
The rehearsal room
The crowd
The brand in the world
Shape six is deliberately honest. We hold strong named proof in culture, sport, simulation and briefing centers, and we hold capability claims rather than named case studies in retail, corporate amenity and multi-market rollout. Say that in the room. Overclaiming here is how you lose a seller permanently on the second meeting.
Do not read all six aloud. Ask which two are most alive in this office and spend the time there.
Open your account list. Three questions.
Not prospecting. These are accounts you already own, with people who already take your call. Any single yes is a candidate.
One account. One space. One person you do not yet know.
The third one is usually blank, and that is fine. Finding out who owns how a place feels is the assignment between now and Workshop 2.
Room, or experience?
Ten things a client might say to you this month. Decide before you open the card. Press O to reveal every answer at once.
Take it, quote it, do it well. Not everything is an experience and pretending otherwise wastes your credibility on the one that is.
The word feel is the tell. Nobody says that about a huddle room. Ask what they want the person to say afterward.
An architect asking means there is a design team, a programme and a budget line. It also means somebody may already be writing requirements. Move today.
Quote it. Then ask what else is happening in the building, because fourteen rooms usually means a floor, and a floor usually means a plan.
Shape one, the front door. Note the buyer: this is a board conversation, which means the sponsor sits well above your usual contact.
Service issue. Fix it fast. Being the person who fixes the annoying thing is how you earn the meeting where the interesting thing gets discussed.
Consolidation always comes with a "why would anyone come in" problem, and the answer is usually an amenity floor, a front door, or both. Shapes one and six.
A donor event means a capital campaign, which means there is a fundraising target attached to how impressive the wing is. That is a story building with money behind it.
Nobody asks for a media server by name to run a meeting room. Somebody in that building is designing a show. If you hear this and do not reach out, that is a problem, and it is a problem for you.
Usually a screen on a wall. Worth one follow-up question: is this wayfinding, or is somebody trying to make the arrival feel like something? The answer decides it.
Run this as a show of hands, not as a quiz with a scoreboard. Four of the ten are rooms on purpose. If everything on the list were an experience, you would be teaching people to hear a yes everywhere, and the first three calls they make would burn our credibility and theirs.
Who at that account owns how the place feels?
Most people cannot answer this about their largest account. It is not a failure. Nobody has ever needed you to know it before. Finding out is the only thing between this session and the next one.
- Name one account from the three questions
- Name one space inside it
- Find one person who owns how that space performs
You do not have to wait for session two. Email xtg@avispl.com or message Ridge with the account name and one line about the space. You will hear back within twenty-four hours.