Spam
I love spam. I get masses of it – from people trying to get me on the front page of Google to earnest newsletters informing me on all sorts of topics I didn’t know I needed to know about.
The reason I love them is because I always send back a polite reply saying: “Thank you for your email” – and on the bottom is my signature with a link to my website.
The other day someone clicked on the site and followed it through to the video of my presentation to our big convention last autumn. The man on the other end liked what he saw and sent me a complementary note.
It turned out we had met a couple of years ago at a networking event in Oxfordshire and exchaned business cards. We had a good chat on the phone. He was a business coach. He knew all about the company and was most impressed but he wanted to focus on his business – so “No thank you” to the idea of joining me as a distributor.
And so we parted company. But ever since then I’ve been thinking about the decision he made. Look at it this way: He’s a business coach. He helps people to become successful – and presumably they pay him a fee for doing so.
But I doubt very much that he gets paid a percentage of their earnings every month from then on – after all that could be for years. It could cost them a fortune over time.
And what would happen if they took the expertise he had given them and taught it to someone else – and that person became successful. Would he get paid a percentage of their income as well?
And would he get paid again when those people passed on their knowledge?
Yet that is exactly what we do in this business – and he’s a coach, for heaven’s sake. He knows already what to do – how to pass on the knowledge.
I keep wanting to smack my forehead and say: “It’s a no-brainer”.
But I mustn’t get myself upset. It’s just the law of nature: Some will, some won’t – so what? Next….