I have many relationships in the marketplace. Most were derived from spending the last almost 20 years marketing in the region, attending events, doing television news, radio interviews, mailings, and every other conceivable technique available. My firm gets most of its business from referrals and I recently received a fantastic referral to a business that needed my payroll services. It was given to me by a long-time business colleague. I had the pleasure of meeting the referral months before at a lunch meeting. We did not talk about him coming on board as a client; in fact we just talked about business in general.

A month had passed when I received a call from the referral—they were ready to come on board. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with them explaining the service, pricing, and all the benefits of my company servicing their payroll needs. They immediately agreed and we were on our way to signing up a new client. Wow, that seemed nice and neat. One quick call, a solid client, good revenue; it really could not have gone any better. So I thought.

We put the new client through our internal process and even accommodated an unusual request with ease. The client was ready to run their first payroll with us when everything came to a grinding halt. I was shocked to receive a call from the new client stating that they felt they were not given the level of service promised. Now, we sell hundreds of new accounts a year and statistically speaking, these payroll conversions generally go extremely well and we have very few challenges. Not this time. It turns out in a moment of frustration the client service  representative handling the account forgot to put the new client on hold and vented his frustration… the client got an earful. Oh, boy.

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Small business expert Rob Basso is the founder of BassoOnBusiness.com, a web-based community dedicated to inspiring the entrepreneurial spirit and getting American businesses back on their feet. He is the president and owner of Advantage Payroll Services, the region’s largest independently owned payroll provider, and the author of The Everyday Entrepreneur. He can be reached at bassorob@bassoonbusiness.com and make sure to purchase your copy of The Everyday Entrepreneur today!