All About Long Island

I Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself October 28, 2006

Under the category “I couldn’t have said it better myself . . .” is this post from  Seth Godin.  I sat down to share it two days ago but sheer exhaustion forced me to temporarily put it on the back burner.  I’ve been spending weeks unexpectedly acting as a general contractor, getting a home ready to market, and shopping for the necessary accoutrements to stage it for sale.  The house was stuck in a time warp, with flocked wallpaper heralding your arrival into it’s archaic past.  This project is in addition to a full load of other business in various stages of development.  However, in our stagnant market in order to really serve our clients, we have to be very creative in our approach to selling their property.

But I digress . . . Seth’s very straightforward comments about how we interact with our clients and the impact it has on both them and our business reminds me of a technique we used many years ago when I was vice president of a sales and marketing company.  We ran seminars all over the country and Canada, showing CEOs how to maximize their marketing dollars.  Before these meetings we would phone their companies incognito and record the conversations to demonstrate how important the person answering the phone was to the financial well being of that company.

Grown men sat, head in hands, listening to the most appalling dialogues between their employees and us, or worse . . . they sat shifting in their chairs as time ticked slowly away while we were put on hold.   Astoundingly these pregnant pauses sometimes lasted for four or five minutes.  Bill, my boss, would then take out a crisp one hundred dollar bill and dramatically set it on fire as they reached out in horror trying to put out the blaze.  When the room was once again still he would quietly tell them, “this is what you’re doing to your advertising dollars if you don’t train your people. 

That challenge was made at least twenty-five years ago and nothing’s changed.  If we’re trying to generate business but haven’t figured out how to nurture it once we have it, we defeat everyone in the process.  The old adage “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” certainly applies.