E T freaking A

I was flying home after a week out on the road, and the weather conditions had us circling over the Atlanta Airport for an hour. Tensions were rising all around as if the plane will soon run out of fuel and tailspin out of the sky, until the pilot came on the intercom and announced the Estimated Time of Arrival. Whereupon, everyone sat back, took a deep breath, and I resigned myself to reading over the next hour.

You will hear me talk a lot about the basics of communication. I truly and deeply believe everything starts and ends there. These fundamentals of communication are based on 4 simple elements: the encoder, the method/means, the decoder, and probably the most important of them all…the feedback.

After all, you can encode as many messages as you want, send them through 5 different means of communication, but if you don’t get any feedback, it is meaningless.
Even if the decoder received the message!

When I was a kid, my older brother used to beat the crap out of me. For years I tried communicating my suffering to my parents, by crying, by telling them straight up, by letters, and even one time in a radical way that I can laugh at now, but wasn't pretty then. They probably heard me. Years later, I found out they even did something about it, BUT they didn't give me any feedback, so how was I to know they were trying to resolve the matter?

Communication is like a magic circle that if broken at any point, is useless. The feedback is that last piece of that circle that makes the magic appear.

I’m going to share one of the biggest secrets in Sales. When you’re selling, make sure you always give feedback; and always remember that one of the most crucial elements of feedback when you’re selling, especially in relationship selling, is ETA.

Take a minute and imagine a scenario where the customer calls with a specific need (the encoder). You set up an online call to understand their need (the method/means) and you now comprehend the need (the decoder). At the end of the call, you communicate to the customer that you will do some research and get back to them with your findings.

And here dear readers is the most critical part (and please imagine me now pounding on the keyboard, screaming and with tears, as I cannot stress this enough!) – WHEN?!?!?!

When will you get back to the customer (the F.E.E.D.B.A.C.K.) ???

And is the killer tip here – when you set a time frame as to when you will get back to them, you set expectations to live up to. As a result, it puts a higher level of commitment on you.

Now, set aside the actual issue on which you need to update the customer, but the mere act of telling the customer you will get back to them in 3 days, then actually getting back to them in 3 days, is a bucket of extra points for you and is fundamental in building a trust-based relationship.

I know what you’re thinking – “But what if I didn't get the answers from my technical guys yet?

SO THAT’S WHAT YOU’LL TELL THE CUSTOMER!! And next time, give yourself a week.

Now let’s switch our point of view, here for a second. Suppose you finished the call with the customer, you (encoder) go to your technical liaison internally and explain to them, via email (method/means), the issue at hand. Your technical person (decoder) replies with: “I understand the problem and…I’m on it.”

Famous last words. 

WHEN GOD DAMN IT?? WHEN!?!?!? I am glad you are on it, but when will you get back to me? (They haven’t assigned a level of commitment to the task.) Demand the ETA.

Too many times these things simply duel for way too long, due to a low level of commitment. As a rule, I typically insist on a timeline and set a reminder for myself unless I've worked with this person and learned to trust they will indeed follow up and reliably deliver.

You see, if you don’t set reminders in place to follow up, and your tech guys take their sweet time, or G-d forbid get immersed in another project and forget, and then you may forget too.  Then one day, 3 months later, your customer, who is now your ex-customer, bumps into you at a conference where you get all wound up about how they left you and how you simply didn't get an answer from your tech guy yet, and how you tried really hard and how it was a holiday and the tech guy’s dog died and your daughter’s first little league game and you had to sub for their coach and your wife got on the president’s club at her work and you just had to travel for a week to Hawaii with her and oh the global warming….

And really, even if you had said it would take 6 months, all that customer needed was an E T freaking A.