Auto-fill….Friend or Foe?

Now that some time has passed, I think I can tell this story without feeling that the person I am speaking about will read this and figure out it’s them I am speaking of. This story could be anyone, in any town, in any state. But because it happened in my town, where I network, and where I work, I had to let time go before telling this great story of how auto-fill let me in on a little secret. (What is auto-fill you may ask? It’s the little tool in your email that remembers all the people you have emailed, it “fills in” in their email address once you start typing it in).

Once upon a time an account executive from a Minneapolis business tried to get CTG to become a referring partner. They found me on LinkedIn, told me they LOVED my business and asked me out for coffee, I refused of course because I don’t do coffee dates anymore.  They persisted and offered to come to my office if I would have a few minutes. Ok, I can do that for a fan (and I sometimes accept if someone will come to my office for a few minutes to pitch something that I may need). During our meeting, we discussed an upcoming instrustry change and maybe becoming friends outside of work “we get a long so great, we should hang out!” type of conversations began. Hey I’m a social person and I love making new friends, so I said yes to happy hour and yes to making a new friend. Then the day of our get together they cancelled. Not a big deal. Then they cancelled again. I was starting to get irritated and wondered what happened.  Then started the fun emails, more chat about the industry changes coming up, calls to keep me on the line, etc. Never met again in person. But what I did notice was this person had slowly received information out of me that I had good insight on in the industry and like a friend…I trusted them with it.

Moving ahead, they slowly lost contact with me after I shared most of the good industry tips I had. Then one day, I got an interesting email that was sent to their entire sales team and I was listed as a sales team member. Wrong Lisa I guess (thus my reference to Auto-fill). I read the whole sales pitch/proposal and found a lot of my “good tip’s” from this executive in the email giving out to their team all of the things I told them. Now, none of these were secrets by any means, all public knowledge, but for us in the industry, it was information that not a lot of folks knew about back then.

Was I ticked off? Yes. I wrote that person back and said, “You didn’t get it ALL accurate” LOL! I am quite sure that they about shit their pants when they noticed I was cc’d because I can tell you this much, I should not have been copied on that email. I still crack up thinking about it. Never heard back from that person ever again.  There are a lot of lessons to this story and the one I want to remind you of is remembering the auto fill feature when sending out emails (double check names! Auto-fill is so easy to just grab the first “Lisa” on the list), there are some other lessons here but I’ll let you figure those out for yourself.

Happy Monday!

Lisa

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