I was sitting in the back of the room, watching the customer.
One of my teammates was presenting and demonstrating our product. The software had an impressive list of capabilities, and we had spent time preparing for the meeting. The account team had done their discovery. We believed we understood what the customer needed, and we had shaped the discussion around those needs.
But as I watched the room, something didn’t feel right.
The customer wasn’t saying much.
There were no obvious objections. No one was pushing back. But there wasn’t much excitement either.
I found myself watching their faces, their reactions, trying to figure out what was happening.
Were they interested?
Were they confused?
Were we missing something?
I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
The strange thing was that, from where I was sitting, I was watching them very carefully.
And yet I wasn’t really seeing them.
We eventually broke for lunch.
I started making small talk with some of the attendees. Nothing related to the presentation. Just the kind of conversation people have when they step away from a conference room and suddenly aren’t talking about software anymore.
At some point, the conversation turned to music.
The week before, I had been at a concert for one of my favorite guitar players, Richie Blackmore.
For anyone who knows his music, there isn’t much introduction needed. He is one of those players whose influence seems to stretch across generations.
As I mentioned the concert, one of the customers immediately lit up.
He was a huge Blackmore fan.
What happened next had absolutely nothing to do with the meeting we were supposed to be having.
He invited me to grab lunch with him and then asked if I’d like to see his office.
When we got there, he had an electric guitar sitting there.
And suddenly we weren’t two people sitting across a conference table.
We were two guitar fans talking about concerts, albums, bands, and some of Blackmore’s iconic songs.
He told me stories about concerts he’d attended over the years. We talked about different albums. He picked up the guitar and played some of the solos.
It was completely unexpected.
And completely enjoyable.
But something else happened.
I realized that the person I had been watching from the back of the room that morning was not the person I had imagined.
He wasn’t difficult.
He wasn’t disengaged.
He wasn’t uninterested.
I had simply been looking at someone I didn’t know and trying to interpret him from a distance.
At some point, I asked him what he thought about the presentation and the demo.
He paused.
Then he told me, in confidence, that it wasn’t going well.
I asked why.
And that opened a much more important conversation.
I started asking about what they had actually hoped to accomplish when they invited us in.
What were they trying to solve?
What had they expected to see?
What was missing?
And that’s when I discovered something we hadn’t understood.
The product actually had capabilities that addressed what they needed.
We just weren’t talking about them.
We had spent our time emphasizing the capabilities we believed were relevant based on the discovery that had been done before the meeting.
But we had gotten the emphasis wrong.
The capabilities they cared about were sitting inside our product.
They just weren’t part of the story we were telling.
The information wasn’t missing from our software.
It was missing from our understanding.
Before lunch ended, I excused myself and went back to the team.
We talked about what I had learned and decided to reset the afternoon.
The second half of the meeting felt completely different.
The conversation started to resonate.
The questions changed.
The demonstration changed.
And, more importantly, the customer started engaging differently.
The meeting eventually led to follow-up conversations and a proof of concept, giving us an opportunity to move the deal forward.
Nothing about the product had changed between the morning and the afternoon.
What changed was our understanding of the person sitting across from us.
I think about that meeting from time to time.
Not because it was an especially clever sales technique.
It wasn’t.
And I don’t think the lesson is that every customer meeting should begin with a conversation about music.
It is something simpler.
We are constantly making assumptions about people from very little information.
A quiet person can look uninterested.
A serious expression can look like disagreement.
Someone who asks no questions can appear disengaged.
Someone sitting silently in the back of the room can become part of the background.
But we don’t really know what is happening inside someone else’s head.
We see the visible part.
Then we fill in the invisible part ourselves.
Sometimes we’re right.
Often, we’re not.
There was another lesson hidden in that meeting.
We had done our homework.
We had prepared.
We had identified the customer’s needs.
We had built a presentation around those needs.
And yet we were still wrong.
Not because we hadn’t worked hard enough.
Because people are more complicated than the information we collect about them.
There are things a requirements document doesn’t tell you.
There are things a discovery call doesn’t uncover.
There are things you only learn when the conversation moves somewhere you didn’t plan for.
In my case, that place happened to be a guitar.
Maybe that’s what I find interesting about accidental connections.
They don’t always give you information you were looking for.
Sometimes they give you something better.
They give you a way in.
A reason to talk.
A reason to listen.
A chance to discover the person behind the role.
And sometimes, when you finally see the person, you begin to see the problem differently too.
That day, I thought I was watching a customer.
I was actually watching a stranger.
It wasn’t until we talked about something completely unrelated that the stranger became a person.
And once I saw the person, I could finally understand what we had been missing.
Sami Joueidi holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and brings over 15 years of experience leading AI-driven transformations across startups and enterprises. A seasoned technology leader, Sami has led customer adoption programs, cross-functional engineering teams, and go-to-market strategies that deliver real business impact.
He’s passionate about turning complex ideas into practical solutions, and about helping teams bridge the gap between innovation and execution. Whether architecting scalable systems or demystifying AI concepts, Sami brings a blend of strategic thinking and hands-on problem-solving to every challenge. © Sami Joueidi and www.cafesami.com, 2025. Feel free to share excerpts with proper credit and a link back to the original post.
