Thoughtful gesture saves sales

Daniel Smith represents Strokes of Genius Painting in Ottawa. He set up a last minute display at the Ottawa Home and Design Show in early October and reported that he generated several profitable leads from the experience.

Daniel Smith yesterday shared this insight on how he saved four of eight fall-through sales in the last three months -- and built incredible good will for three of the remaining cancellations.
Having obviously blogged before, I know the challenge of always finding new ideas to share. I thought you might be interested in hearing about a guerrilla marketing tactic that I have been testing in my Strokes of Genius Painting work, with great results.

Basically, the tactic is designed to deal with the inevitability of clients who decline my services after an estimate, or worse, cancel a booked job because of family issues, illness or some other health/personal issue.

What I have started doing is this: When I receive news like this, I go out and buy a 20 dollar pre-wrapped basket of chocolate and coffee or some such, and then leave it on the client's doorstep with a business card that has a sympathy note written on it.

The true beauty of this is that it is a two-pronged tactic. Firstly, if the customer is telling the truth, and I assume they are, it reflects the concern I genuinely feel for them, and you can bet that when the storm passes, they will remember me. Secondly and by contrast, if a customer ever stoops as low as to fabricate such a health or family issue out of thin air (and believe me, it happens more than you would think), these "bad" clients are made to feel every bit as ashamed as they ought. (And the 20 dollar expense is still worth it, to me.)

I've been doing this since August and so far I have saved four sales this way, three of whom I think were telling the truth and one of whom I have a hunch was fibbing . . .

And was guilted into changing their mind!

I asked him to clarify the numbers. He says of the eight people he provided gifts to, four signed up to complete the work and three called to thank him for his generosity. "And the lack of response from the 8th provides a bit of smug satisfaction as I'm quite inclined to think I caught them in a little white lie . . ."

Thoughtful, human gestures are always helpful and there is something to be said for taking things at face value. If someone says there is a death in the family, or a job loss, or a serious illness, there may well be one -- in which case you don't really want the job. In others, as Daniel indicates here, the client is telling you a white lie to get out of the commitment but (if fundamentally honest) will have second thoughts about the lie when you show respect. In part, this is because you are mapping out your personal integrity and showing, by your behaviour, you are not a "hit and run" contractor.

Rote and creativity -- a real challenge

I keyed the words "rote and creativity" and found Peter De Jager's page "Creativity by Rote and Mechanism" where he writes: "Here’s a rote behaviour which is guaranteed (or your money back) to increase creativity in your organization is: Give all new ideas respect… even when at first glance, they don’t seem to deserve it."

One challenge (that is an euphemism for 'problem') I have yet to truly resolve is my tendency to fall into a rote/script when handling a repetitive task. This correlates with my own need for routine -- I have enough adventure in my life, with the challenges of self-employment , family and the like -- so I like some things to the same way, every day, every time. This certainly is apparent in my eating patterns (for breakfast and lunch) and my favorite sofa seat. These behaviors are normal enough, I suppose, but what is less normal -- and therefore much more of a marketing challenge -- is how to express good deeds and courtesies to clients and potential customers in a systematic, but natural, manner.

Take, for example, the idea of the "thank you call". I thought this would be a great idea a year ago. We have a lot of one-time advertisers, who purchase their advertising largely because they wish to support or maintain healthy business relationships with their current clients. I wanted to connect with these customers in a somewhat stronger and more personal manner than a bland invoice, once they do business with us. So I set out to call and thank them.

First time around, the new initiative worked like a charm. I learned interesting things, found ways to improve our service, and gained a real appreciation of the interests and needs of our clients. So I decided to make it part of my routine. I continued for a few months until I saw something not quite right.

First, I began dreading making the calls. Then I realized why. I had descended to using a call script -- a repetitive phrase that became almost drone-like. I had become, in trying to improve our client service, a "telemarketer". And I sensed that the people at the other end of the line were feeling the same.

My initial reaction proved to be less than effective. Whenever I find I'm doing something I need to do that I don't like, I think like an entrepreneur -- get someone else to do it. So I dumped the work on my sales team. Fortunately, they are astute enough to give it right back to me. They said most people weren't returning their calls, and they, too, said it felt funny to make the calls this way. So we reverted to sending hand written thank you notes. These may be somewhat rote-like, I agree, but they certainly don't have the horrible flaw of the phone calls -- the intrusive, voice mail or time hogging nature of artificial interaction, requiring you (the client) to engage, whether or not you are prepared at the moment.

This challenge of rote-like "relationship" behavior is common in other circumstances. I don't go to too many 'networking' events, but I'm sure one reason I don't is because the plastic goodness at these things drives me nuts. (I am getting better at it of course -- now I really put the 'selling' side away and focus exclusively on sharing, listening, and connecting -- that is when I'm not running away to the bathroom, or a corner table, or somewhere I don't need to be 'there' with the others in the room.)

And of course, we've all experienced and I sense find discomforting the plastic 'friendly client service' with all the scripted niceness at certain retail establishments and other businesses. If the warmth is coming from the heart of the employee, good, if it is coming from the "corporate training program" we can see it a mile away.

As I said at the beginning of this posting, I don't have really good solution to this problem. Maybe you can share one in a comment. The best answer I have is when you find you are travelling down the path of rote and it doesn't feel right, stop and do something else. And maybe that 'something else' is something you like doing. I'm a writer/journalist, so naturally, I enjoy blogging. Here, I combine some routine (right now I'm at my favorite family room sofa) with the absolute pleasure in finding something new and sharing it, instantly, wherever we may be.

Networking the right way

Take a look at this posting by Tim Klabunde (William H. Gordon Associates, Inc., Chantilly, VA) in his CofeBuz.com blog. He quotes Ellen Talley in an article in Building Long Island and concludes with this observation:

What I like about Ellen’s story is her focus on the development of a new relationship. Notice that Ellen didn’t start by giving an elevator pitch or trading business cards with the principal, rather she focused on making a connection. Good networkers know that when you start by making a connection, rather than a sales pitch, the rest will follow.

Exactly.

Today, I received a gracious thank you note from Tim. This is the form of marketing I advocate -- not the horrendous stuff of spam, cold calls, and artificial, plastic "networking" where the objective is to try (usually unsuccessfully) to grab business rather than build relationships.

Merry Christmas!

Services such as easygreetcards.com provide specialized business-oriented Christmas cards; that is where I found this image.

Time for family, friends and, for many, a celebration of faith.

At our business, we give all the employees the day off on Christmas Eve, but I go into the office to check over last minute details, prepare the deposit, and (today) ensure the printer has the final page proofs for the January issue of our newspapers.

Unlike recent holiday seasons, we don't have major travel plans this year -- we'll spend a couple of days in Montreal and Eric is participating in the Bell Capital Cup, described as the "World's Largest Hockey Tournament" later in the week. We're also installing a new server in our office on the quiet Friday between Christmas and New Years.

I'll continue blogging during the holiday period; it's fun more than work -- though there will probably be fewer entries.

In the meantime, I hope you and your family have a great holiday season.

Gifts?

Image from Mind Your Manners: Tips for business professionals visiting Germany

Should we have a seasonal gift-giving program?

This question came up at a recent staff meeting. Chase proposed we obtain gifts for our contract advertisers. We briefly discussed costs; it looks like the expense would be $1,000 or so, obviously not a business-breaker; but (as it certainly is not in our annual planning budget) more than an impulse "yes". I deflected the decision on the matter, noting that we had never given significant gifts on the client side, and I wanted to be careful and thoughtful about it, and not rush the decision. Chase accepted the decision, but said he would use his own resources to purchase gifts for his key clients.

I've been thinking of this some more, as the Christmas Holiday season approaches. The more I think of it, the more challenging the issue becomes. The reason is that conventional one size-fits-all gifts are not necessarily effective, the wrong gift can do much more harm than good, and that you will have trouble finding empirical evidence of the value of gift giving.

But, ahh, the situation inverts when you consider the importance of reciprocity and the influential effect of a truly well thought and creative gift -- especially where one isn't expected.

For example, multi-millionaire Seymour Schulich describes in his book how he managed to obtain scarce library resources as a university student.

"The solution was to get the reading list ahead of time and reserve the books before everyone else, but how,?" he writes in Get Smarter: Life and Business Lessons. "I hatched a plan with my then classmate Lawrence Bloomberg, a serious, persistent fellow (who grew to become my best friend.) We went to the Laura Secords store and bought the biggest box of fine chocolate we could find -- $5 for five pounds (the same box would probably cost about $50 today). We gave it to Miss Sears, the intimidating, no nonsense woman who ran the library.

"Now we didn't know what was going to be on the next MBA reading list, but Miss Sears sure did. So when the herd of nerds next appeared, they were told the books were reserved for Schulich and Bloomberg. Our classmates could never figure out how we always seemed to have our names at the top of the waiting list. . . .

"This small anecdote illustrates one of the most important concepts for a young person to learn, in business and in life: reciprocity. In simple terms, reciprocity is the idea that people have a very hard time saying no to someone who has done something even a small favour, for them."

Fair enough. And a good argument, you may say, for an effective gift-giving program. But here is the problem I'm having in implementing it. I'm simply not sure that a small business can effectively define what gift is right, to who, when the real element of gift giving -- and its true effectiveness -- is based on individual and intuitive decision-making.

For example, Schulich and Bloomberg appreciated that the often-unrecognized librarian would appreciate the gift but its scale and scope were not so excessive as to be seen as a bribe. (Gifts to school teachers can have a similar effect; Vivian says the small gifts she sends on behalf of Eric seem to do something positive in the way the teachers respond/return to her calls.)

Cultural sensitivities are challenging, a gift that is right to one person can be downright offensive to another. Bribery and 'influence peddling' rules also creep into the picture, especially if the gift is going to someone in the public sector where you are hoping to win further work. Gifts with promotional logos or messages on them may be appropriate (and of course the promotional gifts business is huge) but the payback from such unpersonalized gifts is debatable and I think hard to measure effectively.

So, what should we do? One of my good friends in business said he inverted the rules of gift giving and always made special efforts to be generous to his suppliers, not his clients. He said the inversion worked like a charm. My late father, at his drugstore, always took a more conventional approach. Bottles of perfume, chocolates, and other stuff were wrapped each year and distributed to nearby medical offices -- clearly a rational move for a pharmacy (even wiser, he provided low rent space to at least one medical group in a building he owned near the drugstore -- clearly this is an extreme but highly effective way to combine reciprocity and geography effectively.)

I have made it company policy that our sales reps should send out individualized thank you cards to clients (we of course pay for the cards and postage). Obviously it gets a whole lot more complicated however in setting a policy -- and budget -- for gifts. The reason may be that this issue defies centralized policy-setting. Effective gift-giving really works; but you need to be both thoughtful and careful in your decisions (and maybe a little spontaneous.)

Here are a few articles on the Web dealing with this topic.

Image Insights: Gift Giving Etiquette

Gift Giving Savvy: How to avoid cultural blunders and faux-pas

Business Gift Giving at the Holidays: Do's and Don'ts

How to ask for referrals

See http://www.hydroblastpressurecleaning.com

Look at this really effective before/after photo thank you card.
Bryan C. posts on this contractortalk.com thread discussing the value of referrals, this note: "I don't know if this would work for your line of work, but in the PW industry, customers love before/after photographs. I have incorporated this into our thank-you letters. I send a picture something like this that they then can show friends and neighbors and have gotten some good quality referrals from it."