Rules for Making a Good Impression Among the seven suggestions: Respond to e-mails within 24 hours. And don’t use business cards as cues to bombard new contacts with pitches

by Carmine Gallo

Getting favorable word out on a tiny budget is one of the perennial challenges facing small-business owners. Advertising is often too expensive, so most business owners rely on good old fashioned networking and word of mouth. However some are better at it than others (see BusinessWeek.com’s Smart Answers podcast, 4/18/07, “Instituting a Client Appreciation Program”). Here are seven rules that will guarantee a strong first impression and a powerful, lasting one.

Rule #1: Respond within 24 Hours

During the course of researching my next book, I came across an interesting trend. The people who run the most successful companies are the most responsive. When I leave a voice message or send an e-mail these individuals get back to me immediately with information, whether they’re at the office or traveling. One woman who oversees 5,000 employees makes it a policy to respond to e-mail within 24 hours. She says her responsiveness provides a model for her employees. If she responds quickly to employee questions or concerns, they in turn understand the importance of getting back to customers in a short amount of time.

Even if you don’t have an immediate answer, acknowledge receiving an e-mail or voice message within 24 hours or less, and let the person know you’re considering the request or taking action on it.

Rule #2: Greet People with Enthusiasm

When a customer or employee calls and you choose to answer, it implies that you have time to talk. Far too many people continue to multitask during phone conversations. Those of us on the other end of the line can sense it, especially when you give one-word answers to our questions and we hear typing in the background!

Give your customers and employees your full attention. Greet them like you’re sincerely excited to hear from them. And if the time isn’t right, be professional enough to set a later time to give them your full attention.

Rule #3: Make Eye Contact

In conversations with customers or employees, look them in the eye. I know you might love your Blackberry, but please refrain from checking your device during the conversation. Think about how it makes you feel when the person you’re talking to continually takes her eyes off you to check out other people in the room. I’ll tell you how I feel—like it’s a waste of time to even finish the conversation.

Give customers and employees your full attention. It makes people feel as though their opinions and insights are valued. It will help you make a powerful and lasting impression.

Rule #4: Leave Smart Voice Messages

First of all, don’t leave long, rambling messages with your phone number at the end. Keep the script concise. Leave your name, time you called, and phone number at the beginning. Repeat the phone number at the end, s-l-o-w-l-y. There’s also nothing worse than a drawn out game of phone tag. It can’t hurt to leave a specific time when you can be reached. Of course, if you leave a time, be there to answer the call!

Rule #5: Respect Contacts

A conference organizer recently told me attendees have started complaining about fellow participants who treat business cards they have picked up at booths as open invitations to cram in-boxes with solicitations. If someone gives you a card, it’s an invitation to begin a conversation. It isn’t permission to leave a constant bombardment of e-mail sales pitches under the guise of “newsletters.” It’s also not an invitation to send 10-MB files that explain what your business does.

Rule #6: Mind Your E-Mail

Speaking of e-mail, keep your correspondence concise. Time is limited. Use a subject line with no more than three to five words that grab your reader’s attention. Give the pertinent information in the first line or two, and keep your correspondence to one or two short paragraphs (unless of course a detailed memorandum is expected). Also, don’t forget to use proper punctuation and grammar. The spell-check function exists on your computer for a reason. Use it.

Rule #7: Remember Small Touches

When was the last time you received a handwritten note? I bet you remember it. I do. After a brief conversation with the chief executive officer of a well-known franchisor, I was surprised to receive an envelope in the mail with a short handwritten thank-you note along with several coupons for his product. The coupons were for small amounts, but the gesture left a big impression on me.

My insurance and financial planning adviser gets plenty of business from me because of numerous, small touches during the year. Several times a year I can expect to receive a handwritten note, a short voice message, or a copy of an article that I might find valuable given what he knows about my interests. None of these touches are accompanied by a hard sell, but I wouldn’t consider bringing my business to anyone else.

Business is far too competitive to risk making a bad impression. But it’s not that hard to make a positive one. Just think about the way you like to be treated as a client. Follow these seven rules to stand apart.

Carmine Gallo is a Pleasanton ( Calif. )-based communications coach and author of 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators.

Dear Allan:

How can we know if people are doing personal marketing? We know that the economy is booming, our firm revenues are up over last year, but that has to be temporary — it just can’t go on forever! So how can we ensure that everyone is doing their job in keeping the momentum going? It’s so hard to stay focused on marketing individually when there is more work to do. Why is it that some people and some firms are so much better at this than we are? — Rick R.

Dear Rick:

It’s difficult staying focused on bringing in business and doing the business you have, especially if your book is growing. And the way most people are compensated in this profession, if you bring it in you have to then do it (which is total insanity), is certainly not the way our friends in the legal profession compensate their partners.

I’ve said it before and was the first to do so: This is still the easiest business in the world because we compete against accountants, not business people.

I will answer your last question first.

Recently I read a great article written by Larry Williams in his newsletter Commodity Timing. He made an observation that the best commodity traders in the world have specific characteristics. Real business people, entrepreneurs, in my observation these past eighteen years of consulting to our profession, have these same two traits:

1) They are NOT stubborn

The most successful people in our profession are open- minded, like new ideas, are eager to try just about anything to see if it works, and are willing to be wrong.

Last year I did a program with a firm wherein I mentioned that I believed they had a problem with their reception area. Of their three receptionists, two were highly indifferent; the third was a gem. I mentioned this in our program on client relationship management — I believe the receptionist is a highly important area of the firm. I suggested that they either talk to or dismiss the prior two and have the third train them or new hires.

“I disagree!” said the Audit Partner-In-Charge. “We have a fine reception area!” he boomed. Maybe he was right. But in about twenty different experiences with the reception area, and in many others observing how they treated others, I thought they had a serious problem.

What if I (an acknowledged expert on the subject of client relationship management, marketing and selling) was right and he was wrong?

Of course, being stubborn, he wouldn’t even hear of it, so the problem stays or gets worse.

Once again, you can look to our training as accountants for this man’s attitude: he was merely being (overly) consistent. Isn’t that what stubbornness is (to the extreme)? Or are you too stubborn to see it?

Successful people don’t have all the answers, are constantly looking for new ones, and are willing to learn from just about anywhere, including the people who work for them! Bill Gates didn’t dream up Windows — Apple did. The second trait of successful entrepreneurs is:

2) They have a KILLER INSTINCT

Is Bill Gates seeking more market share or less? What would a typical accountant do?

I can just hear the conversation now: “Hey Bill, we’re really backed up in the plant — it’s getting harder to find new people, and we might have to expand, hire new workers, and you know how hard that is, or buy new machines. Are you sure you want to bring out Windows 98?

Can’t we just take care of the business we have?”

Bill Gates has a KILLER INSTINCT. As his business surges, he wants more. He sees the finish line and he surges ahead, even though his knees hurt. He knows that if he eases up, here comes the competition.

In an interview in USA Today, Gates made the following statement: “Your current market share is not a predictor of future market share.”

Would you agree or disagree?

What the heck do you know? Who knows more about marketing and business? You or Bill Gates? There are about eighty billion reasons that he knows more than you or I.

Bill Gates knows that the day we stop marketing consistently and assertively as a business, is the day we start falling behind.

Would Bill Gates succeed in public accounting? Bill Gates would destroy his competition, because they think like accountants, while he is a true entrepreneur, a risk taker, a mover and shaker, an irritant in the marketplace — a person with a killer instinct who won’t be happy until he has 100 percent market share.

What are you happy with? Do you even know your market share?

It is the two traits mentioned above that make certain few firms and rare individuals far better at running their business.

Keeping It Up
The predicament that you, Rick, mention about being busier than heck, leaving less time for personal marketing, is endemic of our profession.

Jay Nosebag, a prominent practice management consultant to our profession, said CPAs basically suffer from two problems that negatively affect their practice: They are reactive by nature and basically too tight with their cash.

Jay noted that CPAs rarely look at expenditures as investments, but as money taken out of their personal pockets.

Net result? They refuse to invest in technology, office space, keeping their best people, training those people in soft areas (that turn out to be the most important areas of client maintenance), marketing and client retention activities.

CPAs also refuse to hire enough administrative people to allow partners and important staff the time to do that which is most productive: billing, marketing and romancing clients and referral sources.

How many times am I going to run into a partner who has to type her own letters, Xerox their own stuff, send out their own direct mail, make their own follow-up calls? All things that could be delegated out to open time for what’s really important just to save a few bucks.

Instead of gearing up for more business, with more resources — CPAs are struggling by reacting to the economy. They are losing more good people because they refuse to pay what it takes to keep them, or treat them the way they want to be treated. They refuse to invest in constant interviewing, and oh-my, head- hunters who cost money. They refuse to add office space, updated equipment, and administrative help.

All of these investments would allow you to have more time to personally market your practice and the firm. Or you will keep falling behind when you should be surging forward.

Counting What Matters
I had the great fortune to have had what I considered to be the greatest sales trainer in the U.S. as my personal mentor. He said: “You can’t manage results; you can only manage and measure effort.”

Don’t be stubborn: Trust me folks, he knew more about this topic of selling and personal marketing than you do.

It is vital that people be held to specific goals on an annualized and monthly basis for their personal marketing efforts.

Allan Boress, CPA, CFE is the published author of 11 books on marketing and selling professional services, including a best-seller, The “I-Hate-Selling” Book now in its seventh printing and published in 7 languages. He has twice been named one of the Top 100 People in the Accounting Profession. He has trained over 200,000 people in the art of selling and personal marketing worldwide. Visit www.allanboress.com for all sorts of articles and ideas. Email allan@allanboress.com

My wife has recently applied for a personal loan product from one of the prominent banking houses in Kampala where we hold a joint shelter savings account. We have been saving in this bank for over 2 years now. The credit department chose to ignore and overlook my commitment to help meet the loan facility obligation and the paper assets (Share Certificate and Unit Trusts) we hold with other entities including the bank balances amounting to 30% of the loan facility required.

One is left to wonder whether the credibility of Ugandans is that bad to warrant this kind of treatment. Or is this evidence of poor bank credit check procedures meant to undermine personal wealth growth by discouraging prospective customers. I have for example has found no justification for the difference in the bank lending rates (18% -25%) and the Depositors interest rates (6%) given the inconveniences involved in the whole loan application process. Or is this a clear display of ignorance and disregard of the developments in the finance sector happening in Uganda over the past year or so. This conservative nature is inexcusable given the fact that it’s a hindrance and contravention to the same gospel of “Bona bagagawale” that we continue to preach to the masses. In the developed world for example paper assets are more widely used as security as compared to the land tittles that our financial sector often requires us to provide on most loan applications.

How can you continue to pronounce the poor saving cultures of Ugandans when you are actually not cleaning your back yard? How can you expect savings to increase when you have such deterring processes, procedures and requirements in place? And most of all how do you expect to achieve the prosperity for all program with these hindrances in our banking sector. I welcome the customer service programs employed by most financial houses in Uganda but I want to advise all key players in the industry to revisit their in-house procedures.

Over the years as a growing professional, I have discovered that employing text book solutions to real solutions will most often than not lead to shunning  of the financial sector by the population if nothing is done to rectify the current situation. The banking sector needs to treat and allow us to become a “partner” in your business. After all, our success is your success.

Arthur Kaliisa

http://smallwins.blog.com

I have spent the last 20 years or so training to be a better professional, probably some of us have spent longer yet we continue to pursue career development every year. I can not over emphasize the importance of practice as a means to achieve good money management skills. We all seek personal growth every day of our life, the reason we do this is because we can not isolate finances from other aspects in our life.

Do not be discouraged by your initial failures. So what if you are poor at managing finances. The most important thing is to accept and appreciate that you are indeed poor in this department and work towards rectifying it. I for example have spent the past few years studying towards being a good manager of other people’s finances but believe me mine have been a mess. Is it any wonder today to find a banker who ignoring all his training and experience advances personal loans forgetting the rules of the trade?

With due respect to professionals the rules of engagement on the ground are very different from what we are taught in any classroom. You have to actually play the game to appreciate the challenges involved in managing finances. How else will you be able to know whether you are over shooting or not in your domestic incomes and expenditures if you don’t have your goals set out clearly?

Map out your goals clearly, draw budgets, monthly, quarterly and annually whatever is convenient and work towards achieving the goals you have set. I see most of us find that we have to set the same New Year’s resolution year in year out with little success. Well, I have to mention that you will be in this circle all your life if you don’t do something about it now.

Start today as we go into the second quarter of the year. It’s never too later to start and remember “The worst thing in life is not how many times you fall down but how many times you get up when you fall” paraphrased from one famous quote.

Happy Easter Holidays as you map out your financials! Arthur Kaliisa http://smallwins.blog.com