Never Forget to Recognize People

Not directly a marketing strategy, perhaps one part common sense, but either way something you can’t afford to miss. Just today I was reminded of the importance of recognizing someone that I never expected to play as big a role in our success as they have.

Just after lunch I finally made it downtown to the bank, my soul mission today was to drop a gift we(One-to-1 Fitness) had purchased for our account manager. She was elated with the gift and shortly after sent a very kind email thanking us for the gift and expressing how privileged she felt to receive it.

The significance of this goes back over a year now. When One-to-1 Fitness began to rapidly expand this lady and her colleague(who happened to be my account manager for my other small company) invited us to an awards banquet. Over the course of the evening we discussed how things were going with our new venture. I explained we were in a state of rapid growth which was both frightening and exciting. Our new expansion required substantial investment, one that would put us at risk if things began to shift or go unexpectedly in our operation. Even though I was dealing with another bank, and was not in a position to move my business they offered a great deal of advice and direction to different finance programs available that would better suit our needs and offer us greater protection.

When we went back to our current account manager with this information we were actually discouraged to pursue these finance programs. The underlying reason, it was a lot of work for the account manager to help us and with no particular reward for them, they didn’t want to do it. We now could not afford not to change banks. To make matters worse we had contractor issues and the paper trail of our full scale renovation was a complete mess. None the less our new account manager was determined to see us through it, with many hours invested, dozens of calls made, a number of visits to our facility (since when does a banker come see you?) she helped us apply and qualify for a unique finance program that allowed us to complete the improvements of our facility and continue to grow at a rapid pace. In fact we’ve continued to grow so fast that we’ve just completed our next upgrade, again with her help.

The point of all of this is; we simply would not have been able to grow as fast as we have without her assistance. Assistance she was not required to give but felt it was good service to provide. Thanks to her the home I live in is not at risk and I can sleep much better at night. This is a rare thing in the world today as I am sure we’ll all agree, so I think it is an important lesson to always try to express your appreciation for the people you deal with. In our case having an account manager that enjoys working with us has made a difference of tens of thousands of dollars in new sales thanks to more space and a better facility.

The nicer you are to people the more likely they are to talk about you, help you, and refer people to you. If you are not in a position to provide gifts for recognition that’s ok, simply start with a phone call, a card, or a letter. It’s so rare today for people to take time out of their day to contact someone and say thanks that when you do the impact is tremendous.