Bank your emotional credits early

I was chastised today for letting my blog entries lapse - time is a precious commodity these days and work, travel, kids, ill family members and handyman jobs have conspired to keep me away from the keyboard last month.

Another whirlwind week of business in London during Feb and another battle with the misery that is Heathrow airport. That place must be terribly demoralising to work in – it seems to suck the smiles out of people as they arrive – international travel has become a tedious and stressful thing since 2001 and it is made even more so by the surly, dismissive attitudes of ground staff.

In contrast some of the clients and business partners I caught up with are just brimming with energy and enthusiasm, ideas and innovations. It is amazing how the power of an individual can be magnified by a positive corporate culture.

I had three recent interesting conversations that led me to today’s post.

We have been providing training to some of our partners recently and one attendee was espousing how much better the experience was with PA than another organisation. Only wanting to beat our chest slightly, we are proud – and I think justifiably so – of our iPOS "boot camp" training, a lot of effort has been put into it by people much smarter than me. The comment was that we gave freely and willingly of information whereas getting things out of the other party was like pulling teeth.

We also have two large, publicly listed organisations using our Consolidations for SunSystems application who recently communicated their joy and delight with its functionality and operations. They both have achieved significant and tangible cost and data integrity benefits from the implementation to the point where they could now not easily function without it. Each of them have also requested enhancements and modifications to make it even better. Always on the lookout for good marketing I asked each if they would provide a "Consolidations from PA is great because ....." statement that we could use as a testimonial.

One turned a brilliant statement around overnight - a giver.

The other came back with a mealy mouthed "when you do what we have asked then we might think about it" - a taker.

In a previous existence I had the pleasure and privilege of having a smart and generous man as the business owner at a client. He called this sort of thing "emotional credit". We did a good job all month every month for his company year-in year-out and he constantly offered his services to us for case study and prospect references. He liked to bank his emotional credits early so that any time he did have a problem he knew there was a deep well of goodwill to draw upon to ensure a best possible resolution. And he was right, if the excrement hit the air movement device we pulled out all stops to deliver for his business.

Bank your emotional credits early. You get a whole lot more out of life.