Here is the second in a series of posts I promised you, reflecting on my own journey from Maundy Thursday evening to Easter morning. This is about what happened to me Good Friday morning.
I am a member of the Seacoast Referral Connection chapter of BNI, a structured international networking organization for passing qualified business referrals. I had the pleasure of substituting that morning for someone in Seaside BNI, my former chapter. It was nice to see so many familiar faces as well as quite a few new faces. As my reason for switching chapters had to do with an industry conflict, I was unable to represent my main business, USANA Health Sciences, so I represented my technical business, CejCo.com, instead. This was fine with me, as I am developing a seminar on Blogging and Social Networking for Professionals, so I used the opportunity to plug that.
The meeting went well, except for the person in that chapter’s Health & Wellness slot, who trashed the efficacy of vitamins … but that will be the subject of another post at a later date.
After the meeting I went up to a woman with whom I had been trying unsuccessfully to schedule a 1-to-1 meeting to learn more about our respective businesses. We had had some difficulties with e-mail communications, and that led me to miss a scheduled appointment time. So I was eager to take the opportunity to reschedule—indeed, if possible to get together right then.
So I approached her, I’ll call her “Sheryl,” and asked if she’d be interested in rescheduling our 1-to-1. She looked me squarely in the eyes and explained that she was no longer interested in meeting with me, as I did not strike her as someone with enough technical acumen to warrant spending time with. (I don’t remember her exact words, but my paraphrase should get across how she made me feel.) I was dumbstruck. After a few seconds, I whimpered, “Wow, that stings. All right. So be it,” and I walked away, tail between my legs.
After a few minutes of debating whether I should wallow in self-pity or not (I chose not), I then struck up a conversation with another gentleman, and he and I met instead. I’ll write about that meeting in tomorrow’s installment.
Sheryl’s treatment of me came as such a shock. First of all, my reason for missing her e-mail to me was that it looked like any number of other spam e-mails, which I am in the habit of letting pile up to be dealt with later. How did I mistake hers for spam? Well, she evidently never got around to updating her e-mail settings to provide her name, so it arrived in my inbox as coming from sheryl@xyzmysterydomain.com instead of Sheryl Lastname, which I would have recognized in an instant.
Be that as it may, I still apologized for missing her e-mail and thus missing our appointment. But that was evidently not good enough for Sheryl, so she blew me off.
What boggles the mind, though, is why she wouldn’t at least want me to know more about her business, so I could pass qualified referrals to her, even if she had no intention of passing referrals to me. Instead she simply cut off the possibility of any future collaboration between us.
The morals of this story are threefold:
- Make sure your e-mails appear to come from real people and not spammers by updating your mail settings in your e-mail client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, etc.). Send yourself an e-mail and see what it looks like in your inbox.
- Never pass up a networking opportunity, even if you can’t imagine yourself referring business to the other party. I have been pleasantly surprised on more than one occasion by what I have found out about someone in a 1-to-1 exchange. Let’s face it, most of us are involved in multiple activities, so there is sure to be at least one area of mutual interest.
- Never burn bridges with people you are sure to see again and again and again. Sheryl’s and my paths are likely to cross weekly, if not more frequently, yet she did not hesitate to sour our relationship. Huge mistake on her part.
Stay tuned for the happy ending, though.
