Speaking, Spam, Spam ...

… Spam, clay on our boots and is the customer always right?

On Monday evening I was at a speaking competition. For those of us who have been used to getting up on our hind legs to give business presentations, speaking publicly doesn’t hold any great fear apart from a few butterflies before standing up. But the learning from watching and listening to other speakers is invaluable to developing one’s own performance. Perhaps like many other things, we can pick it up as we go along and think we can do it quite well without ever having had proper training. However, there is nothing like some structured coaching to initially disabuse one of that idea and then to build on any innate strengths we may have to develop us into a competent performer.

You will note that I have used the words ‘performance’ and ‘performer’. Whenever we stand up to speak there should be an element of a performance to make the whole thing come alive. And most importantly, we should pitch our delivery to suit the audience and the occasion. We should be sensitive to them and react accordingly.

I am sure that none of us likes junk mail, cold calling and spam emails. This presents a dilemma for those in business because we want the potential customer to know about our products and services, but we should want to avoid alienating them by bombarding them with unwanted advertising. How do we know that it is unwanted? Well, possibly we don’t, but we should be sensitive to any feedback that indicates that may be the case. I have had two phone calls recently where I was politely trying to indicate that I wasn’t interested. In each case the caller didn’t take the hint so I had to be a bit more blunt, but hopefully still polite. In both cases I was treated to what amounted to abuse.

I have also had a call from someone offering a business service. I asked for the details to be emailed to me so I could study them at my leisure. Nothing arrived but the same guy called me again a week or so later. I reminded him that he had promised to send information and he said that he would do so. A couple of weeks on and I have heard nothing. Hopeless!

On Saturday evening I was at a dinner and was talking to a very senior executive of a major motor manufacturer. He said that one aspect of the job that he enjoyed was visiting the styling studio to look at progress on new models. We both agreed that talking with the designers, the smell of the clay, and indeed, coming out of the studio with clay stuck to your shoes was a highlight of the new product development process. Developing a new product that is sufficiently forward thinking to be exciting and to have longevity is a challenge because you also need to design something that isn’t so unfamiliar that the customer feels uncomfortable with it when it first appears.

This led me on to thinking about whether the oft repeated statement that the customer is always right is, in fact, always right. My view is that customers are not always right but they do pay your wages. However, I do think that we do the customer a disservice if we do not try to gently lead them towards our way of thinking if we are sure that we are right. As a simple example, if we try on an item of clothing and the sales assistant always says, “That suits you sir.” or something similar, we soon start to discount their ‘advice’. If on the other hand they suggest that we try something else as, “I don’t think that’s quite right for you sir.”, their advice is genuine, it has value and we are likely to go back to shop there again.


David Wike