As you may know, we’re expanding quite a bit here at Botty Towers. It means, by the time that you read this, our Training Suite will have been converted back into offices to accommodate our rapidly increasing team (almost all of whom have been drafted in to support the new Club and Club+ Service which is getting extraordinarily high levels of take-up…)
Anyhow, we have over 110 days of training booked in the Training Suite this year so we need to find somewhere else to host them. Those of you that have been to our offices before will know that we are very well located, close to the centre of Solihull, so we contacted the three hotels that we use in town, the Holiday Inn, the St John’s and the De Vere Village about three miles away. We invited them to come in and meet us for a 30-minute briefing on a tender for 110 days’ worth of meeting rooms and something like 700 room nights over the rest of the year. In total, it will be about £100,000 worth of business.
I swear to you that I’m not making this up… but only one of the three hotels came to the meeting!
You really can’t make it up.
Now, I know we are based close to the NEC and so many of these hotels regularly have high occupancy rates, but their meeting facilities are rarely, if ever, full, and this was 110 days’ worth!
It turned out one didn’t come because the lady who looks after that side of things was ill that day (bet her boss is well chuffed – he could have been here himself). Whilst the other one told us that the member of staff that would deal with this wasn’t allowed to leave the hotel. It’s incredible.
Good news, of course, for the guy that did turn up. He loved it that his competitors didn’t even show up and there, my friends, is the perfect analogy for your business. This isn’t about turning up for tender meetings, for I know that such requests are rare. But it is about turning up in your customers’ mailbox, in their inbox, on their social media feed AT THE TIME THAT THEY NEED YOU.
I know it’s not easy, and it does need effort, but the truth is too many businesses hide their lights under bushels and are invisible too often, for too long, for too many of their potential customers. Just like I talked about last month – it’s all about amplification and getting your message out there.
But who was it?
Many thanks then to Club Member Noel Farrelly who sent me in a couple of very neat “luggage tags” that he and his wife were given at a restaurant they dined in during December. If you look carefully at both sides of the tags. They came with string – it was indeed a neat device, much better than just giving you regular a one third A4-sized voucher, say.
Now, Noel and Janet eat out regularly, several times a week in fact, and they kept the luggage tags/vouchers and were looking forward to using them in January.
But… they genuinely have no idea which restaurant it was that gave them to them!
Look again at those tags. There is no mention of the restaurant. No phone number to call and book and, as a consequence, it’s a classic case of Bananarama Syndrome where “it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it – that’s what gets results”.
You’d never make a silly mistake like that in your business would you?
And finally …
We’ve been doing a lot of recruiting recently and on one memorable day we saw 25 candidates for specific roles. They were all interviewed and assessed by different members of the team and I had 15-20 minutes with each of them. One of the candidates started his interview by bringing me a small gift – a copy of the League Cup Final programme from March 1968 when Arsenal played Leeds at Wembley.
I remember him telling me that he knew I supported Leeds, and that he supported Arsenal and he thought I might appreciate the gift. He was right, I did…
BUT… at the end of the day, having interviewed 25 people, I couldn’t remember which of the candidates it was that had brought me the programme!
Now, this isn’t because I’ve got amnesia, it’s because I was very busy, in major selection mode, and he left me no card, no message, nothing to remind me that it was him that brought it.
So, I did remember what he’d done but I couldn’t tie it down to him. It’s the equivalent of so many of those catchy adverts on TV – we can all remember them… but we’re not sure which product it is that they’re actually selling.
Don’t be frightened to be absolutely clear and overt when you’re sending/giving stuff to people as part of your marketing efforts. Make sure they know it’s from you and that it’s impossible for them to forget… You couldn’t make it up.
