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Business Rule #48:
It’s All in the Asking
April 10, 2006
by Caroline Pfouts
“Find out what they like and how they like it, and give it to ‘em just that way,” a Fats Waller song goes. Sure, Fats may have been talking about sex, but you can rock the world of business doing it the same way.
For this week’s task of renovating an activity room at a Boys and Girls Club of America, the executive meeting with the organization and their sponsor, Ace Hardware, was critical. Whether your judge is your client or your boss—or anyone else you’re seeking to please, for that matter—you’ve got to know what they want, before you can deliver. In situations like these where the judges must rely on their own subjective opinion, rather than a quantifiable result measured in dollars, knowing what is expected is even more important.
Lenny Veltman, the Project Manager for Gold Rush, had a vision of what he wanted his team to do for the kids: a music room. Now, while it’s almost impossible to approach an assignment with at least a few preconceived notions, you can’t let that get in the way of hearing what the client has in mind. Charmaine Hunt knew the importance of taking the client’s opinion into account. She tried to get Lenny to help prepare a list of questions to ask the execs of the hardware chain and charity. Lenny though was so eager to create his music room, he couldn’t be bothered.
Gold Rush might have been able to overcome their lack of planning, if they had just gone into the meeting with at least some sense of what they wanted to get from the executive judges. No such luck. Not only did Gold Rush have no sense of purpose for the get together, but they couldn’t even use it as a chance to build rapport with the execs. Chamaine even got the name of Ace Hardware’s “New Faces for Helpful Places” program wrong and found herself sternly corrected for it. Lenny, for his part, shared his misperception that Ace has just a few small stores and was sharply set straight by another store rep.
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At that point, the room was so chilly, no one on Gold Rush risked saying anything else. Sure, it’s great when you can establish a warm, personal connection with your clients, but you can’t let a little social embarrassment keep you from getting the information you need. The executives asked several times, “Is there anything you want to know?” Simple common courtesy would dictate that it’s time to ask them something about their project, if only to express an interest in what they are doing. Instead, Gold Rush sat silently through much of their brief, ten-minute meeting with the judges and got absolutely nothing out of it.
In contrast, Synergy ran a model meeting. They asked the executives what they wanted to see and learned that it was important to Ace Hardware that their name played an integral role, while the Boys and Girls Club sought an environment that would encourage teamwork among the kids.
Sure the meeting with Synergy went on too long and could have ended with the first round of “goodbyes,” but at least the members of Synergy appeared interested in what the executives were doing with the “New Faces for Helpful Places” program. Keeping them a little longer to answer a few more questions was infinitely preferable to having nothing to ask.
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You can’t let a little social embarrassment keep you from getting the information you need.
