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OQ and the GFC, lessons about email

As you may know, Open Query is entirely self-funded, which means the banks owe OQ and me money not vice versa. Things like interest rates are of little concern, which is helpful in volatile times! Of course I do rely on my bank staying in business, but that’s now subject to a government guarantee in Australia so I’ll just have to go with that for now 😉

So far, OQ has not experienced much from the economic troubles. But I’ll tell you about the possible encounters, since I think they’re of interest and lessons can be learnt.

We give away one book to each student at a training day, that is, provided they’ve paid on time (basically a personalised quick payment bonus). I’ve got a small shortlist of decent books, but generally I’ve been handing out copies of High Performance MySQL (2nd edition) since it came out as it’s very relevant to many of the course days.

For overseas courses we tend to buy up Amazon’s stock and get it shipped directly to the course venue; for courses within the Australia/NZ region we have an arrangement with local distributor Woodslane who also drop-ship to our designated venues. I just send a message and the magic happens. Trusting this, I’ve possibly become to slack in terms of lead time, and this week the message bounced… apparently my account manager has left. Epic fail. I’ve got other contacts there so we’ll get it sorted out, but it’s a delay I hadn’t expected. Yes, they do keep stock of the wanted titles so I know that’s covered.

On a side note, I’ve found that particularly companies that assign me to a specific account manager are also the companies that have a pretty high turnover of account managers, so they keep changing! Some training venues have had this, I’ve noticed it over the years with Dell, and so on. In a nutshell, personal account managers may help carve things up within an organisation, but it doesn’t tend to help me as a client as I can’t rely on the continuity anyway. I wish I could, then it’d be great!

But back to the story of email bounces. Along the same line, we see an small but noticeable increase in bounces from mailing out the OQ newsletter, again indicating that people have left. Sometimes there are multiple contacts at a company, but this is actually not the most effective. I also have a personal email for many contacts, so I can see how they’re going, find out if they went elsewhere and where that is, and then ask for status re MySQL and such within the old business and if relevant a new contact. This works much better for everybody. It maintains the human-to-human connection and that’s worthwhile in every respect (not just for business).

I’ve got lots of contacts, so I’m often in a position where I can put people in touch; I also hear about companies looking for people, and thus it’s particularly useful to also know about people looking for new jobs. It’s fun to do, makes absolutely no direct money, but is extremely satisfying and I would think it’s very useful. That wasn’t the main point of this post though.

For me, the key lesson is to really keep asking people for their personal email as well, as losing touch really isn’t good for anybody. Having an extra email address (or phone#) enables all the other things. Of course, for that to work people do have to trust that they won’t get spammed. Very important.

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1 thought on “OQ and the GFC, lessons about email

  1. I always advocate for folks to use an alias for important things — ie, license@company.com for licensing issues. And I always use my personal e-mail for things (like MySQL stuff) that should I leave my employer I still want around.

    I think if you explain a secondary e-mail address people will get it. Particularly if you only send e-mails to the primary address, and only use the secondary address if the primary fails. ie, say “backup e-mail in case the first bounces”.

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