While waiting in the lobby for the IGC Show to open, I had an interesting chat with a gentleman from a Midwest garden center.

“How’s business been for you this year?” I inquired.

“Fantastic – it’s up 100% over last year,” he responded.

I asked him to what he attributed it. Turns out, my new friend used to work for a distributor and wearied of the traveling, so he went to work for a nearby garden center to whom he’d been selling for the last 25 years.

The garden center owner was known for buying closeouts of hard goods at steeply reduced prices. So far, so good. The weak link was what happened next.

The closeout merchandise would get piled up in the storage barn. Every season, he’d take out three or four of each product in the barn and put them on the retail shelves. He’d never restock mid-season because he was “too busy” to notice when supplies ran out. The next year, he’d do the same thing. At the rate he was going, it would take him 25 years to liquidate the merchandise he’d already accumulated.

Once the former distributor was on board, he made a concerted effort to sell. For starters, the most obvious change was noticing when the shelves were depleted and restocking them in the same season. But he also created large displays, added signage, and trained staff on the benefits of the products.

To some, the need for such changes was obvious. But that’s just the point – what’s obvious to one person, isn’t obvious to another. The “obvious” solutions can often take us the farthest. By creating a system and paying attention to details, this former distributor helped his boss double the business in a single year, in large part by capitalizing on assets he already had.

I don’t know about you, but that story made me revisit the list of things I’m “too busy” to do and look for the obvious opportunities under my nose!

One of the most effective ways to get what you want is to ASK. It’s no different with customer reviews. If you’d like to encourage more reviews on your site, try sending an event-triggered email to buyers some time after they’ve received their product. For hard goods, this should be three to four weeks after […]

As I was sitting here working on blog posts, I got an agitated email from a client who was in the process of launching a new enewsletter we had written for them. In their excitement to get the newsletter designed and out, they made the same mistake that all of us have occasionally made on individual emails …hit “Send” before the email was finished. What should we do now, they asked? My advice:

1) Send a correction immediately. In this case, the company had another emailing scheduled for the same day and wanted to know if they should change their plans, send a correction now and reschedule the second emailing for another day. “Yes!” I told them. The faster you correct the mistake, the more on top of things you appear, the fewer people will read the wrong newsletter, and the faster everyone will forget about the issue.

2) Make it personal. Have a real person send the email. Show some emotion and admit your embarrassment. Apologize.

3) Make it right. If no harm was caused by the snafu, a simple apology is sufficient. If the damage went beyond that, do whatever it takes to make it right.

We all make mistakes, and people are remarkably forgiving when we own up to them, provided they’re infrequent.

Our client ended up sending a correction with the subject line, “Ooops! We got a little excited.” I told them they may have increased responses with that one!

Have you had a similar snafu? How did you handle it and what happened as a result?