Making it Easy to Do Business with You

There has been a fair amount of discussion lately about making it easy to do business with you. Not just you, but with any business. You get the point driven home more profoundly when being on the consumer side of the equation, which happened today. It was a huge reminder about lowering the barriers to doing business, something certainly worth passing along to you.

It was a real eye-opener to call around to numerous local venues today to find a seminar room. One, in particular, is prompting this post. All that was needed at this point in my process is to know if the venue has a seminar room available on the date needed for the anticipated crowd size, and how much it cost. Simple enough, you'd think. One of the major worldwide hotel chains (ok, it was a Marriott), wanted my blood type, sexual preferences, and middle name of my great, great grandfather before they would even see if they had availability on that date. At that point, I wished the representative well and hung up the phone. She could have asked me one or two simple qualifying questions that would have been reasonable, in my opinion, that would have kept me engaged in the process. But no. She apologized up front about some new system Marriott put in place of gathering data before even looking at date availability. Maybe Marriott didn't care about losing business, without even knowing just how much business they lost in that one phone call. After all, here I am, telling the world about it on my blog!! I wonder if they get Google alerts and will contact me because of it. :-)

When people want to know how much your booklets cost, it is, in my opinion and experience, reasonable and necessary for you to ask them what quantity they want, what customization they have in mind, and how quickly they need them. Those elements all influence the price. More than that is unreasonable and unnecessary and may just lose you the sale of the moment plus the ripple that experience causes.

Make it easy for people to do business with you. Do what you can to keep people engaged while still gathering only what you need to be able to give them what they want.

Until next time,
Paulette -- who holds seminars at places that make it easy
www.tipsbooklets.com