In today’s world of constant pressure for our time and attention has personal communication lost its value? There are over 380 influence attempts daily for the average person. It starts with the commercials on your alarm clock radio. It moves to the advertisements in your local or national newspaper. It is every eight minutes on your morning news show. It is on every billboard on your commute to the office. It may be in the elevator or even in the bathroom of some public buildings.
No wonder business owners are jaded and on guard of phone calls and letters asking for a quick introductory meeting. We spend all day trying to get people to listen to our story that we can’t spend any time listening to theirs. A quick story that might change your mind when that phone call comes in and you are too tired to listen to another “pitch”.
We recently called on a community bank to describe our executive benefit and BOLI offerings and process. During the meeting the senior bank executive described a commercial real estate loan that he was working on before our meeting. During his description of the loan it became clear to me that I had a client with similar needs. I asked him if he was open to meeting a new business prospect that was in the market for a loan. He said that he was always willing to meet good potential customers.
The meeting was set and a multi-million dollar loan was structured by the bank. The cash management services of the company soon followed. Both parties are very happy that they met and are now in a great long term business relationship.
The moral of the story is we called on this bank for five years before they were willing to meet with us. They were too busy trying to bring in business. We brought the business to them. It took another two years for us to secure any business from the bank but I wonder if the time frame would have been shortened if we could have met earlier?
We all want personal relationships and that starts with taking a chance and having a face to face meeting. No one person has an exclusive on all great ideas.
For more information on this idea, please contact a consultant at Executive Benefits Network.