Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Where Am I?

A situation at work today reminded me of an exchange my wife and I had a few years ago.  My son had basketball practice one evening and I had told my wife rather than come home and then drive to practice I would just meet her at the gym. 

Practice started and my son and wife were no where to be found.

My cell rang a few moments later and it was my wife. Frantic. Stressed.

She asked me how to get to the gym. I asked where she was. Her answer. "I'm lost".

I asked her what street she was on. She didn't know.

I asked her what intersection did she pass. She didn't know.

I asked her if she could see any landmarks. She couldn't (it was a very dark night).

With each of my questions her tone became more frantic and stressed.

I asked her which direction she was headed in. She didn't know.

I told her that since she didn't know where she was, where she had been, or where she was going it was impossible for me to help her find the way to the gym.

She hung up on me. 

I wondered if I'd be allowed to sleep "in the big bed" that night.

About 10 minutes later they arrived at the gym.

So what got me to recall this little bit of history is today one of our clients asked us to stop promotion to their offer because of "poor quality" leads. 

We have several publishers promoting the offer so we asked which ones were the source of the poor leads.

Simply - our client doesn't know. They don't track the publisher sources.

We asked for feedback on the specific lead data. Is it bad phone numbers? Bad postal addresses? Bad email addresses. Our client replied "we don't share that information with our vendors" .

They then asked us what we could do to improve lead quality.

And thus I recalled the exchange my wife and I had several years ago.

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