When you die, you're pretty much like everyone else

Firing My Company Was About The Best Thing That Client Could Do.

With no warning, at least other than the fact that one of my employees felt "something was up", my company was fired after 18 years of service this week. There were no complaints, no adversarial confrontations, not even any recent or older recommendations on how we might improve our service to them. Three months ago, they asked us to add two specialists which we did quickly and they were very happy with them. In fact, as recent as a month back, the client had had blue sky discussions with an employee of mine on how they would provide all manner of improved circumstances at the workplace. It would be great!

One paragraph dismissal. In a pdf file. On an email. From a secretary. No explanation.

And to be honest, after a few moments of that stinging feeling you get when you have been cold cocked like this, I rebounded. I'd read articles about firing clients from the likes of Seth Godin, and while this was clearly my client firing me, I quickly took stock of what this meant and set about getting a better understanding of what a business relationship really means.

I always considered the nature of this to be a partnership, one in which I provided people who served and protected the client from bad things. Over the course of time the number of people varied, sometimes as much as ten, and for some years as little as one. Given the number of new and old projects, the funds available and so forth, we'd simply played court to their needs, and were perfectly happy to do that.

But on closer inspection I knew that this wasn't actually a good relationship for several reasons:

1) Communication. Initially and for most of these years, it was no problem to get my direct contact on the phone to discuss needs, pricing, billing, work situations, or just check in. Most of the contacts who I interfaced with had no problems returning any message, no matter what the media. The newest contact though was never willing to return calls, or messages unless it was an immediate threat to his circumstance. He not only avoided me, but scheduled and cancelled countless meetings with my people to discuss important issues. Busy, he would always say, but busy can sometimes be read as indifferent.

2) Strategic to my business. At one time, providing this type of employee to a client was a third of my entire business. However, for over ten years, this remained the only client in not only this area of service, but in this industry as well. Beyond the issue of losing the client, the fact stands out that due to the riskier roles my employees were being involved with, my own costs (such as liability and workers' compensation) were rocketing up. While losing this client does affect my bottom line and certainly the gross revenues of my company, that net change when I consider the costs associated isn't all that much. Adding a client in the main area of my business would easily make up the difference in revenues and actually increase the net profit of the company.

3) Accounting. Along the way this client went from paying in Net 15 to Net 30 to Net 45 and then changed their accounting so that billing could ONLY happen once a month (resulting in technically a Net 60 arrangement). The complexity of billing required more hours to decipher and compile than any other client we have ever had (including ones that were not only larger but also more profitable). At times, the client's inability to pass our invoices on to payables meant that we were not paid for months and months. For a small business, being hung out to dry for $100,000 in past due receivables can affect any firm's cash flow.

When I added up all of that, and realized just what this customer really cost (I confess I'd never really put pencil to paper on it), I realized that in fact I should be thanking them for cutting me off. It was long overdue, and should be appreciated, and not a cause for panic or anger. In fact, within a day, I decided that instead of writing a nastigram on how wrong they'd been, I would write a thank you note (to the executive office) gratefully noting the long term nature of our relationship, and appreciating the years of service my company was able to give them.

And so I will

The Purpose of Sales

In these days of incredibly varied forms of communication I am sometimes at a loss for how to manage being an effective sales person. Phoning, texting, emailing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc etc, it becomes overwhelming. It's not really time management or even project management, it's how to shout out in all of these places so that someone, who is a potential customer can hear. And buy.

In the world of electronic signaling, there's something called "signal to noise" ratio, and today, the ratio is pretty small. In essence with all of these channels coming in, most people are likely to dismiss or simply ignore all of the feeds. We hit Next on our voice mail before three syllables come through, we auto filter immense amounts of email (most we'll never even open), and we scroll and scroll and scroll through posts by friends, family, strangers, business associates, and so on. In a lot of cases we could flip through most anything.

I admit there's a lot of trash. There's a huge amount of trash. Communiques that needlessly flow in all directions clog and flood our sensibilities and about the only thing left is to ignore. It's a room full of noise that we have to excuse ourselves from, just to think. For that reason, people who sell products and services are left to increasingly shout louder. Send more emails, post more pieces, Tweet until your fingers bleed. Somehow if we just repeat the signal enough, it's bound to get through.

Stop!

There's only one purpose for sales. One. And that's to create action. If what you're doing is not creating action, then you are not doing your job. That's right, if your phone call, email, post, tweet, text, airplane pulled sign, whatever, does not cause someone to DO something, then you wasted your time. Worse, you wasted your company's time, your clients time, and all of the money associated with making that communication happen.