what every consultant needs to hear

This was received out of the blue yesterday after not having been in touch with a member of the Board of one of my existing clients for a couple of years (I guess all is going well!):

We have had such a good experience with ModPay at the {client name}, I would be grateful for information on setting up ModPay with a non-profit in Philadelphia... Would you be kind enough to call me at {phone number}?

Makes us proud to help and to be referred over and over again.

Sage advice

Aim with your heart, adjust with your head, and always, always, always, do all you can.

A new client sent this to me; thanks, Linda! It epitomizes what we all need to do better, continuously, in our business and personal lives.

No soapbox ranting form me. The words themselves say it all. Let's all practice this!

Guest Blogger Lesley Mattos Tells Us How NOT To Be Treated as a Client

From her blog Adesso Albums entitled,

"Authorize.NOT"

Friday, July 3, 2009 by Lesley Mattos

About 11:00 p.m. Pacific last night, there was a fire in the data center in Seattle, Washington where the credit card processing company for our e-commerce site is located. It was almost 12 hours before Authorize.NOT, as I like to refer to them now, resolved the issue but it took them 9 of those hours before they reached out to their customer base through Twitter.

The scary thing about this is that the Companys back up servers were impacted by the fire as well. Now I'm a very (VERY) small business compared to Authorize.net and even I know that redundancy means more than one copy of your important data and more than one place for it to reside. For God sake, they're the #1 credit card processing company in the world, you'd think they'd know that too!

Whoever is tweeting for them is now singing the praises of their response to the situation. The "tweet" - "Been on conf. call with the team for hours now. Impressed with how calm & meticulous they have been thru this entire event." Great. Next time try communicating that you've got it all under control the instant the issue arises so your customers aren't pulling up a blank website or calling a number that says the company is closed for the holiday weekend. Communicate with YOUR customers so that they can be proactive with theirs. It's not rocket science, it's just good customer relations.

Absent any information, here's what we did for our customers who were unable to complete purchases of our unique instant photo guest books to use for their wedding guest book, baby keepsake album, birthday or wedding shower guest book:

* We checked to see who had abandoned their shopping cart since the outage

* We sent an email to each of them, informing them about the outage and letting them know that we'd contact them again when the situation was resolved

* We offered them a 10% discount on their order when they did come back


The good news (and there always is some) is that I'd bet that someone has lit a firecracker under the "calm and meticulous" Authorize.NOT team are thinking long and hard over this holiday weekend about redundancy and beefing up their crisis communication plan. Let's hope so!

Guest Blogger Adrian Miller writes on How to Screw Up a Good Introduction

Before I let you read the guest blog post, I have to set the stage:
Have you ever met a person who exudes so much vitality and business savvy that you are left saying to yourself, "Wow, I REALLY need to get to know that person better. I have so much to learn from him/her."

Adrian Miller is unique in these areas. I am fortunate to know her and had her come make a great sales presentation to a private group of clients. My clients loved her!

She knows some amazing people and routinely networks people. I know this personally, she has connected me to the leader of a great group of nonprofit consultants in NYC!

Recently, she has started a unique way of bringing people together in virtual network sessions she calls Adrian's Network. Check it out!

Adrian recently posted a piece on Gotham's list-serve and I wanted to repeat it on my blog. It was that good.

It's called How to Screw Up a Good Introduction and since we are all guilty of this sometime, I thought it was worth distributing on this blog. Enjoy.

How to Screw Up a Good Introduction

Networking isn’t a short-term strategy. It’s not about power selling and moving onto the next lead. Smart networkers understand this concept.

Unfortunately, there are many misguided networkers out there that thoroughly don’t “get” the give and take of networking. They only consider introductions as opportunities to sell and irritate fellow business professionals with their short-sighted, myopic view of networking. They don’t take the time to explore all of the potential opportunities and feel that is more important to lunge ahead and aggressively sell to anyone who is put in contact with them.

If you’re having a lack of success with your networking efforts, it’s well worth your time to explore how you are approaching introductions. Some questions to ponder:

Are You Taking the Time to Get to Know New Contacts?
Relationships of all types, including those with networking contacts, require a period of discovery. How can you begin to explore how you can help each other until you understand each others needs, wants, capabilities, likes, and dislikes?

Are You Looking For Ways to Help Them?
Only after you have a good understanding of how you can possibly work together can you begin to offer suggestions. Use the information that you’ve gathered to find logical, thoughtful ways to help.

Are You Uncovering All Possible Opportunities?
Again, networking is a process not a one-time effort. Don’t stop at one attempt to assist a new acquaintance.

Are You Making Yourself Available?
Out of sight, out of mind definitely certainly applies to networking. Keep in good contact with your new networking acquaintance and provide them with all of your contact information so that they can reach you.

Start reading her blog.

I welcome your comments and war stories, and I encourage you to reach out to Adrian and get to know her and her work. Thanks for everything, Adrian!

article highlighting us in a great client relationship

We are pleased to be members of Gotham Networking (ask me about this!) and to help new e-commerce businesses get started the right way, out of the box.
See http://tinyurl.com/c47zgj

How can we help you?

Client seminars

We just held our first, in what I hope will be monthly, free client seminars, in this case for my not-for-profit clients.
The repsonse was great as we filled the room, and the comments were even better, as this one was unsolicited:

Hi Marc,
Thank YOU. The seminar exceeded my expectations. I really did get quite a bit out of it. Thank you for that and for being a pleasure to work with.

I think it encapuslates that we can actually help you in non-monetary ways.
All the best.

Customer Centricity

A snippet of something someone said about us today in an email: "He’s great at getting back quickly."

That's nice to hear, because that's how we operate.

I hear horror stories about interminable wait times on so-called client service 800 numbers, lack of follow through by the service provider and the all-time worse: an emailed answer to a question you didn't ask, not answering the question you DID ask!

We are here for the client-that makes us client-centric!
Let us know if you need help.