The One That Got Away.

'No deal,' is the expression they use on the TV show. I think they make a letter 'X' with their forearms for added impact.

In our little business we get quite few enquiries and some people go ahead. We had a learning experience recently with one customer.

The customer was keen. Asked all the usual questions and you could tell gave some serious pondering time. They kept getting back to us, more questions, more requests for information and other business related issues.

We answered all the calls, provided as much information as we could. Compared to most potential customers we easily spend ten times the usual amount of time. They kept saying how keen they were, 'on the point of buying', 'just one more question', etc .

After maybe a month of this intense relaying of knowledge my wife contacted the person and received a text saying they had signed up with another company. That is fair enough. What we take from this is not any feelings regarding the potential customer but where did we go wrong.

In my previous work in the emergency services a golden rule was to always remember the basics. If you have somebody with huge blood loss why put in a drip before stemming the bleed. It would be like filling the bath with no plug, rather than inserting the plug you turn the taps on more.

This is where we slipped up. Our basics. Usually a few e-mails and two or three phone calls is all that is required. The support we were providing is normally for after the person has come on board. The error was ours. The potential customer was a social friend and we forgot or ignored the basics.

Nurses developed a thing called the Nursing Process many years ago. It is a formula for
Assessing a situation or issue ( 'What is the problem.')
Planning a method of dealing with the issue ('How shall we deal with it.')
Implementation of the plan, actually doing what you said you would do
Assessment to review events and decide how improvements could be made.

This method allows us to formulate plans and evaluate how well the plan works. In previous dealings with potential customers we stuck to our basics, our plan. With the 'No deal' customer we meandered away from routine.

We learnt a valuable lesson.