Last year, I produced a series of marketing videos for a technology company in SoCal. I traveled to several parts of the country to tape customer testimonials and to document their technology in action.
I thought the projects went great and my client seemed very happy with the results we produced for them. They talked about doing a lot more videos and we started to create a web broadcasting marketing program as well.
And then my client stopped returning my phone calls and emails. I read the book “Only the Paranoid Survive”. Okay, I never read the book, but the title sure stuck in my head. I tried to figure out what went wrong. I even sent the last ditch email saying “If we did something wrong, just let us know….blah, blah, blah.
Nothing. No response.
So the other day I was in LinkedIn and I started to think about this client and then it dawned on me, maybe something else less sinister is going on here. I looked up my client and lo and behold – are you ready for this… he left the company 5 months ago and joined a new one. So my emails and voice mails were going into some dark corporate IT system hole.
Even though he moved companies, we are still connected as level 1 on LinkedIn. I sent him a quick email via LinkedIn ( I did not have his new email address) and congratulated him on his move and offered our services to him.
Then I went and looked up his old company on LinkedIn to see if they had new hires. Sure enough, they recently hire a new VP of Sales & Marketing. I sent an email to the company President who knew of our work and requested an introduction all via LinkedIn ( I also copied his email address too just in case he does not check his LinkedIn email often).
That afternoon, I received two emails. E-mail number one was from my client who moved companies and it basically said, “wow-perfect timing, we want to start producing more videos and I would like to work with you again”. E-Mail number two came from the new VP of Marketing and he basically said, “You’ve done great work for our company, let’s talk”. We checked out each other’s LinkedIn pages, saw that we had a few things in common and now I have a meeting with him to discuss their video and presentation marketing strategy.
Did I need LinkedIn to do all this? Not really. I am sure I could have figured this out by making phone calls and doing research.
But because of LinkedIn, I was able find out what happened and facilitate these communications in less than 10 minutes.
Now that is a good thing.
Thanks for reading and I hope you found this helpful.
Robert Grossman
Executive Producer and Presentation Coach
Focus Creative Group
