Our company has recently received an invitation to participate in the 6th Annual CIS, Central & Eastern Europe Airline Engineering & Maintenance Conference to be held in Bucharest, Romania in September. Should be a pretty interesting event. I'll keep you posted on the progress.
Recently, while working on the new projects, I noticed that establishing mutually beneficial business opportunities is a tricky thing. People don't seem to bother to answer emails in the middle of a promising conversation thread, cutting off the communications in its entirety.
It seems to be a popular trend going around when people are abruptly dropping the conversation and declining to reply to further emails when they feel that they do not clearly and obviously benefit from the results thereof. To put it in plain and simple English: "All of a sudden, I'm not interested in talking to you and I don't have enough guts and politeness to reply to your emails, so I'll just pretend my Outlook Express has developed an allergy to your incoming emails and hope you're dumb enough to believe it and not blame me".
I am sure most of us have been through hundreds or thousands of conversations that have lost their edge and are of not too much interest anymore. However, even though the matter you're trying to avoid may not bring you ten thousand dollars on the spot, there is no need to ignore a person communicating to you by not answering his or her emails. Of course, spam and other unsolicited emails should be treated adequately, no doubt about that, but...
The nature of contemporary business can be described as limitless opportunities and alternatives within a few clicks of a mouse. If you're not answering emails, somebody else would. If you are not thinking ahead into the future by severing further contact opportunities, then someone else is going to work with your partner. Most likely, a person who got dumped will make a point to spread negative publicity about you amongst his or her social network members.
One of the marketing gurus (don't remember who exactly, would appreciate a hint) said that a satisfied customer would bring three additional clients, but a dissatisfied customer would take away ten existing customers. This math is pretty grim for anyone selling goods or services and it applies to all areas of marketing and sales, as well as to HRM, logistics, etc..
Recently, a friend of mine shared a link leading to a serious website dealing with the subject of customer loyalty, Netpromoter.com. Two concepts have caught my attention, the concepts of promoters and detractors (basically, the same concept as the one I referred to above regarding satisfied and dissatisfied customers), and of good and bad profits. To save everyone time I'd just post a link to their page describing these concepts, and I am sure you'd agree with me that having too many detractors by ignoring your current or potential counterparts' or prospects' emails will eventually hurt your business.
Another implication of this issue has to do with business networking and relationship building, and I am planning to share a few thoughts on this matter in my next post.
It took a while to install and configure the platform, but once configured, it seems to be pretty reliable and functional. The interface is clean-cut and straightforward, functionality - abundant. One of the few things left to be done is changing the template to something with corporate colors, logos, etc. Hate generic stuff.