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I was meeting with a specific business group within a company that I have worked with in the past. This particular group, I had never worked or met before this meeting. The gentleman in charge came hustling into the meeting room about five minutes late and pretty much from the get go acted like he was being forced to attend this meeting instead of actually wanting to be there. My colleagues and I were going through some analysis that we had done on their company and their customers.
About twenty minutes into the meeting, I brought up and showed some blog posts and discussion boards entries I found online that were discussing this company and the authors of these posts were speaking about their unhappiness and poor experiences they have had with this company. Well I guess that was as much as this guy could take as he immediately interrupted me and said something like,
“I am not going to sit here so you can tell us about a couple of random kooks!”
I tried to go into more detail, but he was not having any of it. I hit some sort of thorn in his side and he had moved to an internal red alert, he had raised his shields and was taking defensive maneuvers. In other words, I had lost him. He was gone and at least for that day, I was not going to get him back.
Ever since this happened, I have been playing and replaying the course of events in my mind. Trying to figure out what I could of done or should of done differently. If you ask anyone who knows me, I tend to always be on the side of honesty and at times bluntly honest which does not always work out no matter how good my intentions were.
We have had numerous discussions here on how can we get our clients to start really listening and hearing us. To get through all the red tape and bureaucracy so we might actually be able to accomplish something. Here is a perfect example where I failed to do that because I did not know who I was meeting with and what tactics were going to work and which would not.
The good news is that I have another shot with this guy next week as we have a follow up meeting. I am trying to figure out a new strategy so if you have any thoughts please share.
Stay tuned for part two next week.
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Sounds like this person did not want to deal with genuine problems. What would be a great hook that would dip into his interests and at the same time link that to your concerns? My sense is that when starting it needs to be more about him than about you or you’ll lose him.
Robyn,
Bite your tongue, you are saying it is not about me?!?!?
You’re right and as I said it is my job now to regroup and go back and try a different and hopefully better tactic. Thanks for your always valued comments and thoughts.
It’s not clear the way you presented the situation here, so you may have tried this or it may have been your ultimate goal.
My suggestion would be is to look for anyone out there saying positive things about them on the same blogs/forums. If so, I’d suggest that you show them some of those as well. Probably more of them than the negative.
That way you can show a balanced approach and demonstrate how they can use the social media to their advantage. You could show them that “yes, you have a reputation management issue to deal with BUT there are already people out there on your side taking action. You just need to support them and get in the game.”
You also might want to see if any of those posts rank organically for some of their branded terms. That way, you take the focus off the quantity and put it squarely on a new prospect’s experience when they encounter negative feedback.
A good approach might have been to agree with him and ask him what he tought *was* important.
Once disarmed, you could probably bring him to be more open to your suggestions.
That or bring bananas to the next meeting and kindly offer him one once he’s done thumping his chest.
Paul - I appreciate your comment, but I have to disagree with you. The issue here is that this company is not involved with conversations that are taking place right now on the web about them. Whether good or bad, they are not involved. They are not listening, they are not learning and they are even taking their rightful place at the table.
I don’t agree that they need to support anyone. They should not need to have someone else fight their battles or stand up for them. They should be leading this charge and learning and reacting based on what they hear and read.
My thoughts. As always, thank you for yours.
Alex - I like the bananas idea, I might use that as a last ditch effort.
Hey Cord,
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said in terms of a client need to listen, learn and communicate with a client.
And maybe I didn’t express myself clearly before, I think where we’re disconnecting is that as I read this, it sounds like you presented this as a challenge to overcome and a crisis to be managed because people are making negative comments. And if you use that kind of language, you’re naturally going to put people on the defensive.
I might have tried to position it as a tool that’s not being utilized and an opportunity for growth. And if you could show some folks out there making positive comments, then those could serve as examples of how the client themselves could actively use this tool.
In the end, I think we both see the same end goal (a client that actively engages and interacts with it’s customers to learn), we’re just taking different routes.
Paul,
I absolutely agree with you. I think we are going int he same direction. I think my emphasis is that I really want my clients to start realizing how important it is to get involved with the conversations that are happening online.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Cord, just trying to change and adjust a bit with you.
The big boys need to see benefits, but in this case I sense it almost might have to be an “aha” moment from them and the trick is to go in with a strategy to make that come about.
Wow, it always surprises me to hear how quickly a company is willing to write off something someone says simply because it’s online or on a ‘forum’.
Two thoughts come to mind with this:
1) Does he write off eBays buyer/seller rating system? Certainly every person who uses eBay and gives any sort of positive or negative review must be kooky just like these guys on the forum, right?
2) The importance for them to join the conversation is absolutely phenomenal. Now, I have no idea who your client is or what dealing with them is like. But what about a hypothetical situation. It may not work because they may simply not care. But what if someone used their product and didn’t like it. This person is a rather active individual, so they wrote a page about what they didn’t like, why, and how it might be able to be fixed. After they wrote this page, they mailed it to the company directly. What would the company do with that mail? Would they scrap it? If so, I would wonder what hope they have for joining the conversation online, as they’re not evening in it offline.
A tough situation. I look forward to hearing about the results!
For me, this has less to do with a personal interaction you had with him and more to do with his motivations for being defensive.
Maybe he didn’t want your company involved in the first place. Maybe he was just having a bad day. Perhaps there was just a cute girl in the room he was trying to impress. (Perhaps you were the cute one)
No matter what you would or could have said, this fella wasn’t having it from moment one. He was lost as soon as someone told him to come to a meeting he didn’t want to go to to discuss a topic he didn’t realize he needed to care about.
In these cases, there is nothing you can do publicly to remedy the situation when it happens. There is also nothing you can do in the next meeting to prepare/mitigate his possible defensive stance.
Clearly he will win any public battle. A quote I always like to remember when faced with stupidity is, “Never argue with an idiot, people around you may not be able to distinguish the difference”
Your only move is to launch a preemptive attack. Have the battle on your turf, on your terms. Get him on the horn and run some initial stats and ideas by him to begin the conversation that you plan to have in the meeting. Let him know how important his opinion is and that you want to assure him that it is your job to make him look good.
Try to get him talking, build rapport, get buddy buddy. At the very least, you will get to know him well enough to prepare some counter strikes for meeting 2 and level the playing field.
Let us know how it works out. I vote for a call or two before the next meeting. Pretty low risk.
Wow what a dinosaur! Unfortunately large traditional corporations are crawling with people like this.