OMG, I missed that appointment!

Have you ever missed an important business appointment?

I missed one this morning and was both embarrassed and annoyed with myself for doing so.

Ironically, although I had the appointment date and time correctly listed in my Google calendar, I’d been using a separate backup/reminder system and that had a different date – two weeks hence!

I’ve apologised and although the potential interviewee has not taken up my offer of a reschedule, he has been quite polite about it all and sent me some helpful information.

Mind you, one of my strengths in business is a sense of responsibility, so it’s quite possible that my annoyance with myself is greater than it needs to be.

But I’m still cranky with myself.

Making the best of it

So on the old principle that when life gives you lemons you make lemonade, I drew up the following five things I have learned or had reinforced from the experience.

1. As soon as you realize you have missed the appointment, apologize

Procrastinating on the apology is not going to make matters better and will probably make them worse. Whether you apologize in person, by phone or by email will depend on the circumstances. In the instance today I apologized by return email as soon as the person emailed me about the missed appointment.

In hindsight, I suspect I would have been better picking up the phone and letting him hear how genuinely sorry and embarrassed I was, and with my being willing to handle his response maturely, without the unintended but relatively impersonal shielding of emotion via an email.

2. No excuses – take responsibility for the mistake

If you miss an appointment, take full responsibility. Don’t blame a staff member, one of your family, having to take a dog or cat to the vet, traffic. If there was a real, insurmountable problem, such as a plane being diverted to another city because of storms, get through to the person as soon as you can and let them know. But don’t embellish.

One executive I knew told me that once, after he had missed an appointment with a more senior person, he got his secretary to write and give the impression that he had been out of town, although he hadn’t. The more senior person was not impressed and told him he should not have tried to hide behind his staff member.

3. Offer an alternative and a sweetener

I’m an optimist so my assumption is that people will be understanding and be willing to make a new time for the scheduled appointment. I go on the front foot with this and offer an alternative time, ideally with my doing something extra: for example, if we were to have met in a cafe in the city, I might offer to meet now in the person’s office. Or I might offer to buy them lunch and have the meeting that way.

In the right circumstances and depending on the people and the relationship, sending flowers or chocolates or a vintage wine, or tickets to a sporting event might be worthwhile. In some circumstances that would be over the top and not appropriate.

Sometimes you’ll decide that none of that is going to make much difference, so you just have to suck it up and move on.

4. Review your appointment calendaring system

No matter how state of the art your calendaring/appointment system is, things can go wrong. I would have expected a reminder this morning on my smartphone, 15 minutes before the scheduled time. As far as I know that didn’t happen. So make sure your system is set up so as to give you alerts at appropriate times before your appointments.

5. Check and re-check

Something I started to do, but judging by from today’s events not done assiduously enough, is to review my appointment schedule regularly – i.e. weekly and daily.

Here is the pattern I intend to follow from now on:
(a) Sunday evening before the evening meal check all appointments for the week and make sure there are no conflicts
b) Each weekday evening, before winding up for the day, check all appointments for the following day
c) Each morning, before beginning work, check all my appointments for the day and make sure I am programmed to be the right places at the right time.

Also, and especially if the appointment has been made some time previously, it is a good idea to phone or email the person with something along the lines of “Just checking. Are we still on today for that appointment at (time), at (place/ Skype/ …)?” I’ve never known anyone to take exception to that.

What other steps might you take to ensure you keep your appointments?

The post 5 Lessons from a Missed Business Appointment appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

I still remember being quite shocked, some years ago, when a blogging expert said something to the effect that if you wanted to attract and keep readers for your blog you should make the language simple enough for someone with a reading age of Grade 7 or 8. So that’s around 12-14, right?

I was shocked because I felt a bit annoyed at the implication that I should be ready to “talk down” to my readership, rather than expressing myself in the language and sentence structure I would normally use.

But I also thought that if I wanted to communicate my ideas and especially if I wanted to generate some discussion it might make sense to get down off my linguistic high horse and write more plainly, more simply.

However, since then – say about 5 years ago – I’ve not really bothered about the level of language or complexity of sentence structure I’ve used. Just hoped that you and others reading this blog would get what I was writing about, clearly enough for it to be interesting and maybe helpful for you.

So all this came up for me today when I was participating in the weekly Twitter hashtag conversation #blogchat where we were discussing the topic of “speaking the language of our readers”. The transcript of this week’s #blogchat is here.

While the chat was proceeding, I ran a little test on a couple of blog posts from my other blog at Des Walsh dot Com. I used the free testing tool at Gift Rocket. Results? One was assessed at Grade 7, the other at Grade 8.

For the one at Grade 8, the testing page declared:

Your blog reads at Grade 8!

Well done. You write better than most bloggers do. Your blog reads at the level of your local city newspaper. Your blog is well-liked for its easy-to-understand flow.

Hmmm. Had I been subconsciously making myself keep the language and sentence structure at that level? Is that appropriately high enough for the professional audience I see myself blogging for?

And what about this Thinking Home Business blog – what was the reading level here?

Much higher, it seems. A test just now on one of the posts here produced this result:

Your blog reads at grade 11!

You write like you just aced your AP literature class. Your writing is up there with USA Today and other national publications. You’re showing signs of promise to be a professional blogger!

 

If that is typical it would indicate I write with a bit more complexity for this blog than for the other.

Might be interesting to test from time to time.

Question. Do you have a blog and if so what do you think is the average reading age of your readership and does that work for you?

The post What’s the Reading Age for Your Blog? appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

I can’t say I’m happy at first.

I’ll be honest. When I see that a bunch of people have unsubscribed just after I sent out a fresh newsletter update, I don’t exactly jump for joy.

In fact, my initial reaction is probably like seeing someone suddenly, without explanation, leave the party you had put on and thought was going well.

The questions arise.

“Was it something I said?”

“Is what I’m sending out useless/boring/annoying?”

And it’s worse when it’s someone you know well.

Now, I know that there can be many perfectly understandable reasons for someone unsubscribing, for example:

• the information in my updates is not really relevant for what they are doing or interested in
• they are trying to establish some control over an overflowing inbox (I can relate to that, especially)
• they don’t remember ever signing up for information from me and might even feel a bit miffed about receiving anything

With the third of those, not remembering signing up, my email service provider AWeber fortunately provides a very detailed record of when people registered and when they confirmed, with date and time down to the minute.

So I am able, with any who leave a comment indicating that they don’t recall ever registering to receive information, to send those details, with a covering note indicating my regret that they might have thought themselves contacted inappropriately.

Generally those messages do not get a response. But happily, one recipient of such a communication from me the other day expressed his wish to be kept informed and asked me to put his name back on the list!

Why I do genuinely love getting those unsubscribe notifications and why you should too

Although my initial reaction is often a basic human “don’t they appreciate me?” one, when I have had a moment to reflect, I am pleased.

Because:

• Who in their right mind wants to be sending messages to people who don’t want them?
• When people unsubscribe I know I am making some impression and hopefully for those who stay on the list that is a positive impression
• My mailing lists are improved by including fewer addresses of people who are not interested in hearing from me
• It puts me on my mettle to do better, provide more interesting/valuable information, improve my communication generally

In fact, right now I can’t think of a downside.

Can you?

I wclcome your comments and any suggestions about how to turn the initial lemon taste of an unsubscribe into an even more delicious lemonade than I can manage currently.

The post Why I Love it – Sort of – When People Unsubscribe from My Updates appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

The old “I’m very busy” fob off

A couple of recent experiences have reminded me that being busy is no excuse for being discourteous. Or for fobbing people off just because you don’t want to say no.

I’m sure we have all had some version of the following.

You go to a Chamber of Commerce or other business networking gathering, get into conversation and make a connection with someone who sounds like they could be interested in hiring your services. You follow up with an email or a phone call and you are told they are very busy just now, and probably for a few weeks to come, and why don’t you call again, say in a month’s time, when things should be clearer.

You duly note that, and call. And get the “very busy just now, yada yada yada” response.

At which point your experience tells you this is a lead that was never a prospect and you should just extricate yourself rapidly so you can spend time in more useful pursuits.

But sometimes, especially when you might not be flush with business or hot prospects, you might be tempted to go along with this game and dutifully call back in a month’s time or whenever – only to be told, almost certainly, that the person is very busy and could you call back….

Let’s face it, they were never really going to do business with you

So what happened here?

I believe it’s because we’re all brought up to be polite. Well, most of us. To some degree. There are of course people who like inflicting discomfort or pain, but the rest of us don’t like to say No.

And in some cultures people are particularly averse to saying “No”: they will say “maybe”, or “perhaps later”, when they really want you to drop the subject and not raise it again.

So when you pitched your story at the networking event, the other person didn’t want to discourage you, so you got a “Yes, sure” when you asked could you call, meet for a coffee, or however you phrased it.

Then when you called, your “prospect” did not have the moral courage to say “Look, I’ve thought it over and although your services sound great, they are not for us”.

So an assistant was told to tell you your “prospect” was very busy and could you call back, say in a couple of weeks time.

And you know, really, what’s going to happen then, don’t you? The busy story.

It’s usually, for truthfulness, on a par with “the dog ate my homework”.

The worst thing we can do is to go along with the game

Let’s face it, we’re all busy.

Either we are busy providing service for our clients, or we are busy chasing leads and seeking to turn them into paying clients.

So one day, when I got one of those responses, I thought “Hang on, don’t give me the ‘too busy’ story. I’m busy.”

So either my pitch wasn’t good enough, or the “prospect” had no relevant pain or need I could help with.

The rest is game-playing.

They don’t want to waste their time, but are too “polite” – or too wishy washy – to say so.  In fact, what they are doing is impolite. Discourteous.

And we are allowing ourselves to be cast in this game as the people with all the time in the world!

People who are desperate enough to be able to be fobbed off with the Busy story.

That’s bad for us, bad for our brand, and bad for our morale.

A sales trainer of mine used to be always on about having the right “posture” in the market.

Just like our mothers told us to stand up straight and put our shoulders back.

Playing the game of calling back, even though in our heart of hearts we know they are hoping and expecting we will just give up and go away, is not good for our posture. It can subtly undermine our self-confidence, our pride in what we have to offer.

And that’s surely bad for our business.

I admit I’ve been caught

I have to admit I’ve fallen into the trap in the past and dutifully made the calls, been put off, made the calls, sometimes over a period of months.

No more.

My response now is “Well, I’m busy myself, so what I believe would work better is for you/your boss to call me when you can clear some time to speak, if you are still interested, and with luck I may be available at that time.”

In sales terms, that’s head up, shoulders back.

Of course, by not playing we may lose some deals

No one can guarantee that, if you turn the game around and make it your game, not theirs, you won’t thereby miss out on one or more great deals.

But it’s the way I prefer to play the game these days.

On my terms.

I’ve also become much better at being frank early, up front, with those pitching to me and where I know I am not a real prospect.

I’ll even cut people short in the midst of a pitch – doing that as politely as I can – and tell them I am not their market, or words to that effect. They might be discomforted at the moment, but I know that my behaviour then has actually been more thoughtful and courteous towards them than that of the people who are on their list to be called back, and called back, and called back.

Let’s us not have people spinning our wheels with their “He is very busy, could you call back in x weeks time?” game.

And let’s us not do it to others.

Life’s too short for such silly games.

I know this goes against the grain of what I was taught – and maybe what you were taught – about persistent selling, but I’m ok with it.

Your view? Any related experience you would like to share?

The post Being Busy is OK, but it’s not an Excuse for Discourtesy appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

Turbo-charge your LinkedIn presence and influence with the 14 day Linking Edge Intensive

OK, so you are on LinkedIn. But are you taking advantage of the power of LinkedIn to help you grow your business?

Most people I speak to about this tell me without hesitation that although they have a LinkedIn account, they are not using it in any strategic sort of way to help their business.

But there are many other people around the world who are using LinkedIn systematically, strategically, and reaping benefits from that. Not always in direct sales: it’s not that kind of platform. It’s a professional network.

Consider some facts

• 259 million+ members and growing, with 2 new members every second
• dominated by high-income earners ($75,000 annual salary) and college graduates
• highest social networking platform usage among 50- to 64-year-olds (read “business executives and decision makers”)

What if you could engage with even a fraction of those 259 million+ professionals? Could that possibly help your business?

Or are you already clear that LinkedIn is a professional network that could really help you, but maybe you would like some guidance on that, some systems to help you leverage your LinkedIn account and do that in a time-efficient way?

The Linking Edge Intensive

I created the Linking Edge Intensive to help people at all points along the spectrum of LinkedIn engagement, from those just starting to use LinkedIn to seasoned users wanting to give an extra turbo charge to their LinkedIn game.

It’s a self-directed, but supported, online program over a period of 14 days. The aim of the program is to turbo-charge our presence, reach, engagement and influence on LinkedIn.

The next Linking Edge Intensive starts on Monday February 3

• It’s led personally by me
• Small group means you don’t get lost in the crowd: you get personal support to really move your LinkedIn activity along.
• There is an ongoing private online group of past and current participants

For more information, including the very special, seriously competitive Early Bird price, plus online registration, click on this link.

The post Are You Using LinkedIn’s Power to Help Grow Your Business? appeared first on Thinking Home Business.