Got Heart No Strength

Streaming text messages beeping away on my mobile prompted me to write this post....

We are organising an outing to our partners this afternoon to somewhere in the eastern part of singapore....

At the beginning of doing the RSVP late last week, response hasn't been good..... we open up all invites and barely can fill up the numbers we wanted. Finally, we managed to have comfortable turn out and that's just the beginning of disappointment.....

While we do reconfirmation yesterday late afternoon, one said not coming .......

Since this morning, my colleague had receive 2 msgs stating not coming .... we were dammed disappointed lor ..... and we are all crossing all our fingers ... not to rain PLUS NO MORE CANCELLATION !!!!!!

While I do understand many cannot come because of work commitments or children commitment, I simply couldn't believe in falling sick (all at the same time) at the last minute and thus cancel out on people just like that.....

I cannot be felt our efforts to 'reward' them has gone to waste as they do not appreciate us at all... Does all rewards have to come in the form of monetary terms? Or they felt they can happy dun come dun come lor - doesn't matter what, what's the big deal if I dun turn up, not going to make any different what? Is this what those people are thinkg about?

I began to think should we continue to do such things to please our partners who are not appreciative at all..... And will our constant pester on our partners to 'give face' to us to come for our events turn out to be a nuisance soon? Do they think that we are pestering them like a pest?

This brought me back to analyse a survey that we did mid 2006. We asked our partners how many times of sales visit a year from us is considered adequate and all of us are caught of surprise by the replies. More than 80% think twice or 4 times a year is enough ! At that time, we were laughing at ourselves are we so like pests or our partners are just simply too busy to entertain us whenever we pay them a visit.

Nevertheless, I learnt to take things in my stride. Even there are only 10 partners this afternoon, I have to make sure the event carry out smoothly and ensure they enjoyed themselves.

I also began to appreciate every event I am invited too, the hard work people put behind the event to make it a successful one.

My mobile phone 'beeped' again.....

Help !