The Merrill Dubrow Blog

Thirty minutes after I had an initial phone interview with a potential candidate I received this email from LH:

Thanks for talking with me today about research opportunities. I am always impressed with the willingness of people to give back to others. I look forward to seeing you in person next Friday at 9:30am.

As for the goodie, attached is yesterday’s article on Mary Meeker’s trend summary of the internet. Fast Company referred to her as “The Internet Whisperer”, and she has amazing data to support her conclusions.

Did you know consumer drone shipments are up 167% year over year and are expected to make $1.7B in revenue?

Have a great weekend!

LH

What a great email. Very creative! Without question she was very thoughtful and strategic in her interaction and I loved it! I speak to a tremendous number of people in their job search and have never suggested sending a follow-up email with an article that might be of interest…. I love it!

• What do you think of this strategy?
• Have you ever received anything like this after you interviewed someone?
• What is the best follow up email/letter you have ever receive?

  I look forward to reading your comments!

  Posted in Advice, Business | Post Comments (2) »

Decades ago when I started in the market research industry I was working for Marianne Schafer and I remember preparing to send out questionnaires, supervisor instructions, and materials for a 20 city project I was handling. Marianne came over to me and asked me what I was doing and I proceeded to say that I was getting all the materials ready, printed out the labels, and was getting everything ready to box up.

She watched me for a minute while I was counting 100 questionnaires to put in the box and proceeded to stop me and say there is a better way to do that. As she was saying that she grabbed the scale, one of the stacks of 100 questionnaires, and said instead of counting and boxing up 100 questionnaires each box will get 9 ½ pounds of questionnaires.

A different way of thinking about things led to a simple and easy solution and a time savings of over an hour!

So I say to you be like Marianne Schafer and find a better way to do the easiest things and enjoy some time savings!

• Do you have any learnings that someone has taught you along the way?
• What do you think of Marianne’s little trick?I look forward to reading your comments!

Posted in Advice, Business | Post Comments (2) »

Like most of you I am involved in a lot of referrals both on the giving and the receiving end. Everyone is usually very good about saying thank you in advance of doing anything or using the referral but sometimes follow-up afterwards is limited and probably should be viewed differently.

From time to time I am guilty of this as well. Someone may give me a referral for an open position or a restaurant and I need to do a better job saying what happened afterwards. Recently I gave a referral to a contact of mine W.D. who is a realtor and he sent me a really nice and heartfelt text after he met with my friends saying how much he appreciated the referral and how much he enjoyed meeting my friends. He even went to the next level and said here is the game plan moving forward. I thought that was really nice, smart, and thoughtful. It made me feel good that he took the time to do that and in fact I will start to do much more of that moving forward as well?

• When someone gives you a referral other than saying thank you what else do you do?
• Now that you have read this post do you think you may approach referrals any differently?

  I look forward to reading your comments!

  Posted in Advice, Business | Post Comments (2) »

One of my pet peeves is companies that make it very easy to sign up for their services and almost impossible to cancel.I had this exact problem with a gym. They couldn’t have been nicer when I signed up and paid them but when the facility wasn’t working for me, I had to jump through hoops to get out of the contract even though the salesperson guaranteed it would be easy to terminate. Finally, I was tired of dealing with them and disputed the charge on American Express…mysteriously, it went away never to be heard from again. I must admit, a few weeks ago the same thing happened with Sirius Radio. I spoke to three different people, thought I had cancelled the service (because I was getting rid of the car) and each time (much to my surprise) it wasn’t cancelled and no credit was coming as they had promised.

• Does this happen to you?
• How much does this bother you?
• Who is the worst offender of this practice?
• Any helpful hints to make the process easier?

I look forward to reading your comments.

Posted in Advice, Business | Post Comments (4) »