One of the guiding rules of business is to be positive and
put forth a positive feeling in your customers. That philosophy should be reflected
in your dealings with your prospects, customers, and clients. Negativity has no
place in your daily business and will drag you down mentally, physically, and
emotionally. However, there are some observations that we should consider on
how not to operate your business.
You must make the experience of your prospect, customer, client,
and everyone else to be positive and make them believe that you actually care
about them. They should reflect back on any interaction as enjoyable enough
that they would refer others to you without a pause or hesitation. The
following examples violate this principle.
- - Automated answering services that offer no
means of reaching an actual person or leaving a message. If your caller’s
inquiry does not fit any of the choices that your service provides, what do
they do if they cannot reach a live person or are able to leave a call back
request?
- - Businesses whose phones are answered by a centralized
service, without any notification to the caller. The caller is left mystified that
the attendant does not know what office they are calling or does not recognize name
of the company’s representative.
- - Business cards without any means of contact. If
you do not provide your name, business name, phone number, email, and web address,
are you really in business? If you do not want to provide your physical
address, provide a mailing address such as a private mail box.
- - Pricing which seems to the prospect to fluctuate
by the day of the week. While this may not be true, if your prospect believes
it, you have a creditability problem.
- - Being ignored when you enter a place of
business or being required to wait when there are sales associates standing
around seemingly engaged is chit chat. A restaurant which makes people wait to
be seated when there are vacant tables will lose the patrons who walk out and will
never see any referrals.
- - Websites which cannot be accessed without a
detailed sign up process including subscribing to a newsletter or frequent emails.
Businesses must provide complete information and the ability for the visitor to
contact the business without exposing them to an onslaught of sales pitches.
- - Businesses with long, detailed customer
agreements resulting in unauthorized upgrades or add-ons which are buried in
the fine print. Just tell the prospect what you have to offer, how much it
costs, and exactly what they are buying in simple terms without the cloudy
restrictions and stipulations.
These are just some of the negative aspects of business that
I have seen in the last few weeks. We must strive to make the prospect believe
that the initial contact, as well as the total buying experience, is a pleasant
one, maybe even fun. The easier that it is to do business with us, or even just
get to know us, the more referrals that the prospect will send to us. That is Gratitude Marketing.
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