I remember sitting face to face with an unamed ad agency director. “Andrea”, he said, “Honestly, we’re struggling we are, I won’t lie.” and I thought to myself from the exterior everything looked like business as usual. Sure the office was a little worn but every agency worth something is a little beat up, if they’re honest. They we’re looking for a sales woman, that’s not me, obviously as my hand trembled a little at the idea of rehersing a pitch, but the conversation went from what they wanted to what they couldn’t figure out.
They mined the internet and said oh we tried that. I smiled and said of course, since everyone who’s done a little mining and direct sales ended up dissappointed, ashamed, or unable to share their illegal secret for selling online. We sat in that office for about an hour talking about ideas on how to go in a new direction. And I realized that without this face time we would never have known the real challenges the company was facing.
Tech talk is fun, how to do this on social media, how to run this campaign, or how to automate for search engines. But REAL TALK now there’s a concept we shouldn’t stray away from. Yes, we can be efficient and still be face to face. So put down your bot software (figuratively speaking) and think about this for a second. An autotweet is productive but a conversation is timeless. It leaves a longterm impression, one that has the ability to spread the word, lengthen industry conversation, and ultimately build awareness as to what you are doing.
I like to be a little humorous, why not lighten the conversation right? But the image above is something I’ve been considering a great deal these days. We are so busy being productive that we seem to be allergic to slowing down and looking people in the face. Earlier today I was on a call. A client and I were messaging back and forth and it seemed like a long cherade of “thanks, lets change this” or “what do you think about this”. So finally we took about 5 minutes to just sit down and hash out some understanding. And wouldn’t you know it, a few hours after our conversation that phase of the project was complete. Let’s stop playing phone tag, text tag, chat tag, or autoresponder tag. Let’s sit down, slow down, and put some face time in your business will thank you for it!
