Pitching is a vital skill in the freelance world. If you can’t sell your business to others, you’ll find that pretty soon you don’t have a business. We’ve covered before how to set yourself up for a perfect pitch, and a “how not to pitch” case study on a terribly anti-social social media agency. Today we bring you another nugget from the Freelance Advisor inbox, and the lessons we can learn from it.
PR agencies are all about finding a “hook” – a hot topic they can hang their client from to make their services seem relevant. In early January, for example, you’ll receive lots of press releases about New Years Resolutions and “the cost of broken promises”. Around Valentines Day you’ll see plenty of PR activity around love, relationships and making single people feel better about themselves.
Sometimes, however, you get the feeling the PR agency sending the press release didn’t really think carefully about their “hook”. For example, this little gem that landed in our laps (twice) last week:
Missing from work – only reported a week later!
How SMEs can manage absence from work
Why was the MI6 employee, Gareth Williams’ non-attendance at work only reported a week later? What processes are in place in MI6 to monitor absence? It is normal that employees report their absence as soon as possible or even the next day.
This is a question I’m sure many HR professionals will be asking. Managing absence is high on the agenda of small businesses, simply because it is known that absence has a major impact on colleagues, clients or customers and, of course, the organisation’s bottom line.
[snipped]
These are my 5 top tips for managing absence in a small business:
1. Draft clear absence from work policies which include when, what and how to notify absence – any absence
2. Ensure managers know that it is their responsibility to implement the policies 3. Continuously train managers and supervisors – include how and when to contact staff who do not notify
4. Implement return to work interviews and ensure absence is reported and recorded
5. Communicate to staff, then communicate again … and again.
I’ve taken out the names of the people sending the press release and the company they are promoting (although I’m sure a quick Google will yield that information should you be so inclined).
In past “How not to pitch” pieces we’ve examined point-by-point what went wrong, although I think the failings here are pretty obvious. On the grand internet scale of triviality, a five point list on how to manage staff absence is somewhere around the “massively trivial” end, whereas a recent, tragic, unsolved death is right at the other end, in the section labelled “not trivial in the slightest”. We might be going out on a limb here, but perhaps tying the two together doesn’t make the most sense?
The lesson here, surely, is that just because a story vaguely related to your client is in the news, it doesn’t necessarily make a good “hook” to “sell-in” your client? Just have some common sense, please.
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