So Many Stories; So Little Time

How many of you depend on national conferences and trade shows to build your network, open doors for new business and strengthen the trust and relationships you have with current customers?  Even with the invasion of web seminars and instant lessons, on our wireless laptops every day, we still find the money for travel, hotel, food, cabs, tips and registration fees, plus the days away from our routines to make the journey.   

We make this costly investment in professional development and advancing the knowledge of our respective professional communities, be they engineers, business executives, professors, nurses, financial analysis, risk enterprise managers, or nature center administrators, to name a few. They are great opportunities to fill the Blog Writing notebook.   

Boy, do I have a few hundred pages of great stuff for you. There's more than enough here on customership and growing small businesses to blog plenty of times each week for the rest of 2007. Let's begin.   

This ended up being a two spiral-notebook summer. That's how many notes I made for blogging topics.  Over the Labor Day weekend, I slowed down long enough to look at how many blogs I have NOT written because of all of the meetings I was invited to and participated in.   When your business and your life is a string of interesting people and great stories, you can run out of bandwidth for blogging.  Accept no excuses. There is always time to blog, right?

Here's a page of notes from one convention experience, the American Society of Association Executives Annual Conference and Exposition in Chicago in August.  It was a record-breaking year with more than 7,000 associations and their executives. I've gone to the ASAE conference for many years and in many different roles, depending on which associations were our clients that year.  This year, I went as the only Duct Tape Marketing Authorized Coach in the entire association industry and had a terrific time with 7,000 customers and prospects, all for myself with no competition.  It was a perfect time to interview famous customer evangelists and gather blog grist for the Customers Count content mill.

The headline of this page of notes says, Best Experience and Worst Experience Contrast.  After years as a fan for Creating Customer Evangelists--How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force, I met Jackie Huba.  Even better--we heard her customer evangelist presentation to a breakout session of about 1,500.  Then there was our one-on-one time after the presentation. Getting some serious hang time with superstars of the small business growth community is mind expanding and validating.

At the other end of the customer experience spectrum, I make my way through a massive exhibit hall and had a conversation at a booth where I would be considered a prime customer.  I'm the person they studied as "typical best customer" and prepared for.  They spent thousands of dollars to be there and stood on their feet, on the cement floors of McCormick Place for many days.  We exchanged business cards and had some substantive conversation.  Then, two weeks later  I get a form letter (by email... not even real paper and stamps) that talks about how nice it was to meet me and our conversation about their products.  Wrong!  First of all, the person signing the letter, I never met.  He was never at the booth.  Next, I didn't have any of the conversations mentioned in the letter.  And they completely did not follow up with what we did talk about.  That's not the worst of this customer abuse story, yet.    Because I could see this was starting to turn into a blog topic, I shoot back a response (again like a perfect customer) that says, "Great letter.  Let's talk business.   I can open my calendar next Monday for you."

How many of you would be thrilled if your new business form letter came back with an enthusiastic response, in spite of your lack of individual recognition for the customer?   What I got right back was an auto responder that said the person, from whom I got the letter, was really not in the office at all this week and wouldn't be back next week either. 

My jaw is still on the floor where it dropped when that auto responder hit me between the eyes.   All of those big bucks to exhibit,  staff salaries, and hundreds of hours for preparation and on-site work,  just to kill the budding customer relationship?  If it's this hard to get some decent interaction during the sale, can you imagine the nightmare you are buying if you become a customer?

This all made me wonder if we were all at the same convention or not?  Didn't we just hear Jackie Huba tell us all of the secrets of generating tons of business with and through customers? 

What we know to be a huge truth in marketing and in business today is customers no longer tolerate arrogance and lack of a wow experience.  Customers don't disappear.  They just go to someone else who will take care of them.

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