I was going to title this something else and then I found this cartoon which says it all (smile). I have written a bit on this topic before and I am warning you ahead of time that this may come off as a “rant”. Fact is, this post is born out of both frustration and a sincere desire on my part to see folks achieve maximum success at whatever endeavor they choose to pursue. They say that “you get no second chance at a first impression.” To a large degree that is true but, I can guarantee you that repeated boorish behavior will firmly solidify that sad condition and leave for little, if any, hope of recovery.
I own and operate business to business networking groups so I perhaps tend to have a slightly more heightened awareness of these things. I have also been in B2B sales virtually all my adult life and I am pushing 57 right now. I’ve been around the block. As a sales person, I lived on referrals and made a very nice income doing so. While I no longer actively sell a product or service per se (other than membership in our groups), I never made a single cold call during the last 5 years of my direct selling career. I earned referrals by:
- Being responsive – every email requesting a response and every phone message was answered every day before I shut down. This included weekends and evenings.
- Doing what I said I was going to do and when I said I was going to do it.
- Being proactive – if there was a problem that I was aware of, I was the one who called the customer before they called me.
- Keeping my clients informed – By keeping them in the loop on all progress, they rarely had to call me or wonder about where we were at with “x”.
- Consistently demonstrating follow-up and follow-through.
- Promptly admitting when I was wrong and promptly taking the steps to correct that.
- Liberal use of the words “please” and “thank you” and letting my referring partners know where I was with their invaluable referral.
My question is … what in the hell ever happened to the use of basic manners!? Am I just too Canadian (smile)? I’m going to cloud these examples over to protect the guilty but in the last week alone, I have seen ….
- People continuously asking me for something or telling me to do something and never using the “magic” words. No “please” before and no “thank you” after. They “command me”.
- Email messages that go unanswered after repeated requests for assistance and a response.
- Folks who dodge me over monies owed.
- Referring folks to others and never getting an acknowledgment let alone a “thank you”.
- Providing “something” to folks for free and … never getting either of the above.
“I meant to do that but I was just too busy!” Yeah, well guess what? I’m going to be too busy in the future to do that for you again! These are the same folks who will wonder why I don’t refer them to others. Hello! If you do this to me, what reasonably sane person would not assume that you would do this to my valued client? I may be dumb, but I’m not totally stupid!
Thanks for visiting!
Craig
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