Don't forget the personal service

It's pretty easy to spend an entire day hiding behind technology and forgetting personal service.

When I was in high school in the late 80s I worked for a local realtor who really understood technology. We were using multiple databases to target specific areas (a combination of phone records, tax records, and real estate records). In our mail campaigns we were monitoring the message, the frequency, and overall effectiveness. We had our systems pretty well tuned.

We were data mining the real estate board and finding listings about to expire and then mailing them. We were testing out different phone technology. We were constantly testing out different mediums. We once sent out a newspaper like piece, and the recipient's name appeared in the headline of the top story - remember this was late 80's before stuff like this was common place.

My boss was a good realtor but despite our huge technical advantage there were several guys around town who consistently outperformed him. I once asked a top realtor how he got his business, and he told me that he was just as friendly as possible, and meet as many people as possible. He would walk into a local bar or the super market and talk with everyone.

I had an interesting conversation this past week with a prospective client. She was talking to me of the importance of having personal relationships.

In the end, you can have nice tasting sheets, a great website that really conveys your brand, mass email that is highly targeted, but nothing beats personal relationships. When the economy is down, and people are starting to choose which wine clubs they want to belong to and which ones to drop, I beat you the choice overwhelming comes down to who they have personal relationship with.

Side note: This message of personal service applies to us at Vin|65 as much as it applies to wineries.