Communication and First Impressions

Today, let’s start with a cliché: You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.

I’ve repeated that sentence countless time to students, especially when we were working on resumes and cover letters.

But I saw a post on social media today. The person was asking for support for her favorite cause, and it was a good cause.

The problem was the writing. It was so riddled with egregious errors that I could not focus on the message. All I could see were the multiple errors, and, fair or not, I developed a negative impression of the cause AND the writer.

If we, as professionals, want to get our messages across, the delivery has to contribute to the objective. In this case, the delivery actually muted the message.

Years ago, I was the assistant to the assistant of the General Manager of a major hotel. The manager was both intimidating and inspiring. His insistence on excellence in all aspects of a job helped me to grow and learn immeasurably.

My job was to open the mail, throw out obvious trash, and to neatly stack the rest. As he passed my desk, he would slow down just enough to be able to grab the pile of mail as he headed into his office. He always spent the first hour of each day answering his mail, so I had to finish my part of the process before he arrived.

One morning, I opened a letter that I was pretty sure would be tossed out. The envelop was a mess, and I suspected it was just trash.

When I opened it, I realized that it was a legitimate sales letter, and I was pretty horrified. The hotel had recently distributed a call for bids for the in-room refrigerator systems that would be placed in the 3,000+ (and growing) rooms. The contract would be for sales and service, and would result in millions of dollars of revenue for the supplier.

In other words, it was a big deal.

The letter I opened that morning was an introduction from a sales rep for an in-room refrigerator company. He was expressing interest in submitting a bid, and the letter was the first step.

The problem was that the letter, itself, was a mess. A huge mess.

Grammar errors. Usage errors. Spelling errors. And, to top it off, it looked like he had been eating while he prepared the letter and had wiped his hands on the paper. It was smudged and dirty.

I couldn’t throw away the letter, so I reluctantly put it in the pile, the boss took the letter, and then I just waited.

It wasn’t long. Within an hour, he came charging out of his office, put the letter back on my desk, gave me a cassette tape (I’m dating myself here, I know) on which he had recorded his response, and he instructed me to transcribe the response and put it in the mail that day.

I put the headphones on, and from the first word, it was amply clear that he was not impressed by the letter at all. The response was direct and raw. He specifically mentioned the errors, the presentation, and the overall lack of respect that the letter showed—for both our hotel and for his own company. He ended by assuring the salesman that the hotel would not accept any bids from his company.

I looked down and noticed that the original letter was covered in red ink. My boss had marked ALL the errors. I was directed to immediately send a copy of the marked-up letter along with his response to the salesperson.

And to his boss. He wanted the boss to know that his company would not being doing business with the hotel because of the deplorable communication.

Ouch.

They didn’t get a second chance because the first impression was so bad. I have wondered over the years what that salesperson ended up doing, because I feel pretty certain that his in-room refrigerator sales career was cut short once his boss received the material I sent.

All these years later, I still remember that experience whenever I open a sales letter. Or when I write a cover letter. Or when I meet someone for the first time.

First impressions count. Nowadays, in addition to making them in person or through letters, we make them via social media, or email, or even texts. Our communications need to reflect the image that we want the recipients to have after they receive them. If we hope to have any chance of meeting our objectives for initiating the communication in the first place, perhaps we are well advised to remember the story of the refrigerator salesman.

We're never really selling refrigerators, after all. We're selling ourselves, and we have to take full advantage of making that first impression count.