Back to work?

I received an email from a blog reader (thanks…always appreciate hearing comments, thoughts, and such!), asking about a phrase I frequently use here. When posting about an upcoming trade show, conference, or convention, I sometimes use the phrase “Back to work”. They asked what I do between shows, if going to shows is “back to work” for me.

It’s a valid question, and raises a short-coming I don’t mean to reflect here. I work every day, so going away is not back to work for me. Sure, I love the shows, and really blossom when I’m in that environment. But I work between the shows as well, so I need to stop using that phrase so much!

I work the phone (followup calls, cold calls, inbound calls from prospective customers), I work email very heavily (I have a number of our best customers who do nearly all their business via email these days), and I write letters, posts, faxes, articles, and anything else I can find to write. As you may be able to tell from this blog, I like to write, and do so as much as I can. For someone who spent many years in radio, you’d think I would prefer speaking…but I nearly always wrote things out when I had something major to say on the air, or at least outlined it, so writing has always been part of what I do.

Actually, I’ve had several people say I should write a book on Group Sales. The Seminar is completely scripted, word for word. I don’t always stick strictly to those exact words, but I wrote the entire thing out. I could easily convert that into a book format, but I wonder if it would hurt the seminar to make it available in book format as well. I like to write, but I LOVE to teach!

When it comes to working with customers, it all comes down to what they want! I teach in the seminar that one question that must be asked of every customer is “how do you want me to contact you?”. And I use that information constantly…if XYZ Tours wants to be contacted via email, that’s how I contact them. If there’s something extremely important or confusing, I will call them, but I take their request to heart, and use their preferred method as much as I can.

So please forgive any confusion…when I go to a trade show, I’m not going “back to work”, and I promise not to use that phrase any more.

This entry was posted on May 21, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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