Cheese Intervention
Yesterday afternoon as I was fishing through junk-mail – I came across a one-million dollar-bill. No, not a bill for a million bucks – but a black and white paper copy of a million bucks, stapled to the top of a legal sized envelope.
I opened it. I wonder if it means that the fake-preneur got his point across? According to the sender — it seems as though I should re-finance my house. Perhaps he doesn’t know that I just sold my house. His letter with the fake money stapled to it went on to describe how I was quite un-smart for not answering his previous attempts to assist me in the refinancing of my property. He stated that he used the money (fake as it was) to get me to open the envelope.
Several things struck me about the guy. Multiple things bothered me about the guy. First of all—he used fake money. Let alone a copy of fake money. He belittled his audience (me) in his letter. He used poor quality paper and made several grammatical errors. But, what really bothered me is that when I phoned his 800 number to tell him to stop sending me fake money and degrading propaganda – he had a very cheesy voicemail message.
If you plan to use cold calling or direct snail mail to get the attention of new customers – you must follow through with professional voice messages or answering services. Now, the fake money culprit was obviously not very professional. And I called him to kind of just prove that to myself. But his letter did promise one on one service and personal attention. His letter promised human interaction.
Cheese heads like that open the door to truly creative people like us. We know our customers don’t want fake money and fake promises. Consumers are sick of the “same old.” You can’t sell quality in a cheesy way. So waste no time sending letters that aren’t proofread or printed cleanly. Each item that holds your name or logo is a direct representation of you.
Class goes a long way. But the world has a way of permanently marking those who take the cheesy way out.
One Comment
John Wang
June 8th, 2007 at 3:00 am
Talking about fake things and people: there is a guy out there, named Hanzhong Cheah who is totaly fake. He claims to be an entrepreneur, a VP, a developer, I mean all of this is bullshit. I used to work with this guy, all he is is a slaker, he tries getting all the rewards and aknowledgement from his collegues. Beware, stay away!
Leave a Comment