A new Topic I am going to try and talk about.

I am continually amazed at the tools you can find on line. Some to help you with business, some with home and others are just neat.

So to start with, Surveymonkey. Actually it is www.surveymonkey.com After the PEER1 meeting, I needed a way to get some information on topics for next meeting and for evaluation of the meeting. I had filled out several surveymonkey surveys before, I had never sent one.

It was easy to set up an account, creating the survey was easy, all drop down menu's and easy to read explanations. I really enjoyed the experience. It looked extremely professional. Probably to most, this is not new information.

It was all free!? So this is my first tool that I am sending out!

A sales call gone bad?

Had a sales call with a company calling on me yesterday. First the person was 4 min late. Not a great start. He could tell I had some frustrating experiences with his company. He started telling me how their processes were bad, people (Now gone) were bad, distribution was bad and installation was bad, however the product was great. WELL it better be with all that.

First off all, he had no idea what my issues were, they never ask.

Then he threw, well, everything under the buss

Last we ended with nothing to follow up with, no action plan and just excuses.

Interesting thing is that this sales rep had over 20 years in the business?

If you have to do these "Bad" sales calls, I think there is a process for this.

1. Let everyone there know you are here to bring resolution if possible.
2. Listen, pay attention and make notes.
3. Create a action plan that includes time frame, anything that you or the people involved are responsible for
4. Let everyone know when you will be getting back
5. Somewhere in there repeat the issues back to verify that you truly understand the problems
6. Here is the MOST IMPORTANT step. You have to do what you said. If you don't this will be ugly.

Problems happen, it is how you deal with them that is most important. Ignoring them will guarantee failure and losing a customer.

Dealing with problems poorly will create more problems, loss of revenue and probably loss of customer.

Great customer service is dealing with problems. Honesty, integrity and truly caring about the customer will make you a customer hero and may make a customer for life

PEER 1 update

So the first PEER1 meeting was today. I have to say it went well beyond my expectations. All We had members from every major entity there. The conversation was positive, educational and very interactive. It is interesting how no matter what our business is how reassuring that similar positions struggle with the same issues. This seemed to be the one thing out of the meeting.

Beyond that there are expectations of being able to lean on other peers for their experiences and together be more powerful than a single.

Now the real work begins. Focusing on execution, working together and real collaboration.

I want to send out a thanks to Erik Thorsell for his idea to get this group together.

Starting a new Peer Group on Wednesday

Thanks to Erik from my HTG group, I am leading our first IT Director peer group. Not really sure what to expect out of this experience. It is going to be different than the HTG group I am in due to the difference of owners versus career specific people.

The real interesting thing is we invited 20 people and had 15 to attend. This exceeded my expectation. Infact we had many people let us know they had wanted such a group and are very interested. A great start to this trial!

I will report back in on the results.