The answer is given simply in a recent Harvard Business Review article stated in part:-
Your boss's boss has a broader perspective on your organization than you (or your boss), and can see more of what's coming down the pike — be it new products or possible new assignments.
The President has the best view of the most urgent strategic needs of the company. My project leader may well be two or even three levels down, but my best work is done for the good of the whole company.
That they arrive is a bit of a miracle. The short story is that I enquired of the supplier as to why the stamps arrived anywhere from 4 to 28 days after being ordered. Turns out Picture Postage is at the mercy of Canada Post, who stipulate “that we must allow 5-15 business for delivery once the order is shipped”.
Now 5 business days (BUSINESS days) to mail a letter from a major Canadian city to another major Canadian city seems a bit much to me.
15 days is downright lacking in responsibility.
My enquiry has resulted in the supplier advising Canada Post that the shipment has been “what they consider to be lost in the mail”, so now I’ll wait while another order is prepared and, perhaps, lost-in-the-mail or else takes 3 weeks (15 BUSINESS days!).
The clincher is this:
I have the option of using an overnight courier other than CPC, that is not looked at fondly around here as all parties would like to keep everything closely tied together from an overall business prospective.
The Overall Business Perspective seems to be that the supplier and CPC have to work together on this, but the supplier ships within 48 hours of receiving the order, so CPC is letting down the side.
And where, in the name of all that’s profitable, is the client (me) in all of this?
I don’t hear anything about “Gee we’d better make sure this gets tightened up”.
All the more incredible because I am, after all, ordering postage stamps that should be delivered by the very organization (CPC) that profits by my making use of postal services!
Today there’s a fresh idea that can be used by all of us.
First off: Do you sometimes shudder at the thought of picking up the phone and making a “cold call”?
I knew you did.
I do too.
Sometimes.
Call it Christmas, Hanukah, The Big Sleepover, or what you will: just about everybody is going around TELLING people to have a prosperous New Year.
Now let’s suppose you are a practicing Christian; you’ll be OK saying “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”, except for your fear of cold-calling.
Now let’s suppose you are a practicing Jew; you’ll be OK saying “Happy Hanukkah and a Happy New Year”, except for your fear of cold-calling.
Now let’s suppose you are atheist; you’ll CAN be OK saying “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”, except for your fear of cold-calling.
I think so. Does your Muslim (or Jewish or atheist) contact celebrate Christmas? Possibly not.
Does your contact recognize that in your country Christmas (Hanukah etc) is a major festival? Certainly so?
But what if your contact is a rabid anti-Christmas (any-Hanukah etc) fanatic?
Then you probably don’t want to be doing business with them anyway.
Business is about compromise; we compromise on features, price, delivery date, schedules. The whole thing about the word “Entrepreneur” (“between”-“taker”) is about give and take, flexibility.
You aren’t asking your contact to meet you for midnight mass on December 24th.
You are calling to express a genuine hope that the next week or two will be peaceful and restful, and that following the break, the next months will be prosperous for your contact.
Of course you want them to be prosperous: if your contact gets prosperous, there’ll be enough money in the budget to retain you!
Cold-calling has a bad reputation because it seems founded on approaching a total stranger and asking for money; that’s getting awfully close to a hold-up, and that’s not good.
· But for the next 4 weeks you aren’t calling to sell anything.
· For the next 4 weeks you aren’t calling to probe about anything.
· For the next 4 weeks you are calling SOLELY to emit a wish from you to them.
That’s it.
“Hi Jerry, it’s Chris. I’m just phoning to wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”.
Suppose the phone goes into voice-mail. That’s a bonus. Your shyness doesn’t matter. You’ve left a short and positive message, and you have re-established your name in the front of your prospect’s mind.
Suppose you get a gatekeeper? You can ask to be put through to Jerry’s line, and if the gatekeeper asks to take a message, You can ask to be put through to Jerry’s voice-mail (see above).
Suppose you get straight through on Jerry’s direct line? That’s just great. “Hi Jerry, it’s Chris. I’m just phoning to wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”.
And that’s ALL you need to say.
You aren’t selling today.
That can come in the New year.
Today you are calling ONLY to express your wish that your contact enjoys this time of year.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanukah, Seasons Greetings, Have a great ....
Almost a year ago I documented my Introduction to the World of Tweeting, and am gradually getting a grip, as we say in the trade.
One of the subtleties is recognizing that my target audience tends to be online during business hours, and tends not to be so attentive outside those hours.
So I’ve tried to tweet about important topics – new services, new products, strong blog postings of mine and so on - during business hours, and outside of business hours I schedule those tweets to appear early in the next business day.
In the early hours of this morning I realized that I can still keep my name in front of people by using this slack time-of-day to retweet other users tweets, thereby getting myself into their good books (“Thanks for ReTweeting me!”), without cluttering up the twitter space during business hours.
Like I said, subtle but, I believe, significant.
Talk to Me!In theory.
In practice I believe that Bill-C28 will be applied seldom, and then only at great expense against mega-millionaire spam kings.
You and I don’t need to worry about Bill-C28. The lawyers are interested only in people with lots of money, millions of dollars.
So Sleep easy.
But do pay attention to what is required, because if nothing else, it makes for courteous business sense.
“Bill C-28 ... requires recipients explicitly to opt in to receiving e-mails and other electronic communications rather than simply requiring that they be given an opportunity to opt out ...”.
Most commercial mailing list providers stress this every time you breathe in.
“If the sender of the message has done business with the recipient in the past two years, consent to receive commercial e-mail is implied. But since that implied consent now expires after two years, businesses that rely on it will now need a way of tracking their business dealings with people on their mailing lists and either removing their names from the list or obtaining their explicit consent to keep sending them messages before the two years are up.”
This is the more interesting paragraph.
My accountant says “Business is the exchange of two pieces of paper, one of which must be a cheque”, so in theory many of the people to whom I send an occasional email could have me chased by The Feds.
Even if I have supplied them with goods and services “that implied consent now expires after two years” so I ought to be confirming, every two years, that it’s still OK to communicate by email.
How to do that? Well, having lunch every two years as a minimum ought to be a good time to ask if it’s OK to send occasional emails.
“businesses ...will now need a way of tracking their business dealings with people on their mailing lists “. Well, for sure. But shouldn’t we be doing that anyway? Keeping track of each contact, with a time-stamp of each communication, whether we phoned, left a voice-mail, mailed a letter, met for coffee, and so on. How else would you know which contacts are getting attention?
“... removing their names from the list or obtaining their explicit consent to keep sending them messages.” Again to my mind this is a no-brainer.
The strict letter of the law may find a nit-picking loop-hole, but long before it gets to court, the CEO is going to have the executive assistant ask you to stop mailing postcards; they don’t have time to take you to court.
And any judge would laugh at the suit.
P.S. Here’s a simplified view of the bill.
