Business at the Speed of Rude
January 15th, 2008
Does this sound familiar?
You get a potential client on the hook, have some great discussions, seem to hit it off and the job that needs to be done is right up your alley. So you spend valuable hours putting your proposal together, send it on over, follow up in email, follow up by phone, follow up in email, and spend valuable hours wondering how much more you should follow up before giving up. Oh, and of course through all this you get nothing but radio silence from the other side.
Or this:
You’re recruited for a job that seems right up your alley. You talk to the recruiter who passes you over to the phone interview which results in a first interview which results in a second interview which results in a follow-up interview scheduled for an hour that instead takes two hours and this is great and we’ll let you know and then … nothing but radio silence as days stretch into weeks and more.
From both personal experience and the experiences of people I know, these are all-too-common situations. Why? Is it that difficult to pick up the phone or fire off an email and give someone the status of a situation that’s taken up many hours of their valuable time?
I’ve been in many situations on both sides of this fence. When I’ve recruited writers or Web designers, for example, I might get 20 responses to a note I post on a discussion list. I respond personally to each and every one — and that’s before anyone’s spent more than the time it takes to pop out an introductory email. Sure, it takes a bit of time, but it’s not that huge an inconvenience.
Business travels at the speed of light these days, but it’s also traveling at the speed of rude. That’s flat-out wrong, and it’s up to all of us to redouble our efforts to make things better.
Takeaway for marketers: In a world where rudeness is the norm, a little bit of common courtesy can go a long, long way.
JANUARY 16 UPDATE: I posted a shorter version of this post over on LinkedIn. Looks like it touched a nerve.