On Words and Business

A friend who runs his own service business recently did an analysis of his customers. He found that those with annual revenues of less than $30 million fought him on price, paid late, or generally were a bit more difficult to deal with. Not because they weren’t good people; not because their businesses were failing; not because they didn’t offer fabulous products or services. So what was the problem?

Seth Godin’s recent post, More Perfect, offers a possible answer–one does best by preaching to the converted and improving the perfect.

So…work with businesses that are successful. Work with businesses with a track record of valuing your product or service.

Exactly how you pin that down, other than looking at financials, is more an art than a science. Isn’t it?

It happened yesterday, quite by accident. I didn’t mean to do it, but I did. I thought I knew the answer my customer wanted to the question she asked. It wasn’t the answer I had, so…I started my reply with: “To be perfectly honest with you…” Basically apologizing that I couldn’t say what I thought she wanted me to say. With one turn of phrase, I exposed the uncertainty I’d been hiding under my confident attitude.

Mike Schultz’s blog entry discusses this and other “tragic phrases” (as soon as possible, the truth is, etc.).

This doesn’t happen as often in written communications, and it shouldn’t. The beauty of communicating via the written word, in whatever medium, is that there is time to reflect, time to rewrite and edit, and time present the best version of the conversation.

Have you ever seen examples of these tragic phrases written in marketing materials, websites, other written materials?

If you’ve never done this, try networking in a room full of marketing professionals. It’s fun and you can learn a lot about how to network. Especially if marketing is not your thing. Think about it, enumerating and/or clarifying the features and benefits of a product or service is what marketers do. And that’s what people do when they are networking. But since we are talking about ourselves, it’s hard to think of it as marketing.

It is really a combination of both. Netketing has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?