RANT!!! How Will They Find You?

I swear I'll never understand how people can overlook mistakes in their very own signatures when they see them over and over and over -- in the mail that they send and then in most of the mail that gets sent back to them. But I see it again and again.

Yesterday I was asked to do some work for a new client, and yes -- you guessed it -- there was a mistake in his signature.

But not just any pedestrian mistake such as a typo in his phone number, which would have been bad enough. Nope. This client of mine had managed to append his signature to an untold number of email messages with his own name misspelled.

Can you believe it?!

How did I find out? Well, luckily, the firm has one of those names that is a listing of its senior partners' names. You know, like Smith, Jones & Papadopoulos. I happened to notice that one of the names in the firm's name was almost (but not quite) the same as my client's name. Since he is a partner, there was a pretty good chance that it was his name, spelled correctly, on the letterhead. So I asked him. And it was.

So I say to myself, "Rochelle, give the guy a break. It's not so terrible."

But it is.

Imagine that you did it. How is a new client supposed to write you back and not make a fool of himself? It's a guaranteed way to make a person feel like an idiot when he finds out that he's spelled your name wrong. And then when he finally finds out, he has to change the misspelling in his phone directory, in his mail client, in his paper filing system, in announcements, in reports, in presentations, and on and on. Talk about annoying!

And how's he supposed to get information about you in Google or Dun & Bradstreet?

Errors in the company name, contact information, or website addresses are just as bad. They lead your customers on a not so merry chase as they try to find you. There goes more business down the drain.

So what's the moral of this story? Simple.

CHECK EVERY PART OF YOUR SIGNATURE VERY, VERY, VERY CAREFULLY.

And don't think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. One of my clients had a business card with 17 errors in it. Absolutely true! It happened three years ago, but he's still talking about it.