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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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Technorati Tags: poor experiences, bureaucracy
This morning was the official launch of Age of Conversation, a book written by over 100 bloggers from all across the globe. I was lucky enough to have been given an opportunity to write a chapter in this book and I am very excited to read what the other 100 or so bloggers came up with. I have already placed my order this morning for both a hardcover, paperback and an e-book.