I had planned to write a post today about the “power of honesty & truth” and one of our customers from PPC Classroom made a comment that is a great lead-in to my point…

Here’s what he said (right on this blog, here…):

“…I think you did great by boldly accepting that things did go wrong and offering huge bonuses. I can’t even imagine how freaky the situation might have been considering it was a mega launch and the expectations were high.”

Abhijeet was commenting on a post where I discussed a massive failure we had during the biggest product launch of the company’s history. It was a huge nuclear meltdown after months of work and THOUSANDS of people anticipating…

Here’s what happened…

We planned for a long time and had set to launch a product on Day X and Time Y. Everything was perfect. The pre-launch buzz was HUGE, people were running, stampeding and tripping over each other to get into the course.

We had TONS of promotional partners & an amazing product.

Now, in this industry, we’re used to seeing servers MELT the minute a product is launched. It’s happened to 80% of launches for years (no joke) - so you’d think we would learn, right?

Well, our company spent close to $12,000 preparing and getting a crazy server set-up.

Yet…the minute we launched - KA BOOM! it all exploded and eggs were thrown in our faces.

Now, instead of the biggest launch in history, we had…

-> Irrate customers
-> Support e-mails/calls flying in
-> UPSET promotional partners
-> Overloaded/Under-slept team members

You name it…we had it…

So we’re embarrassed, scared, shocked and darn right humiliated…what now?

Well, we chose to go down the route of HONESTY. Rather than make up some “gimmicky” message saying, “Oh, we’re so awesome, we had so much traffic, it all exploded” - no…that was not the truth. Yes, we had tons of traffic, but THAT’s not why we exploded.

We wanted to take the high ground.

We sucked it up and immediately apologized.

I made a video for the promotional partners, I let the customers know and we just worked on getting the system back up.

…When finally up - it was time to make it up to everyone.

Now, we sat down and thought “what can we do that will blow everyone away and really make them happy with us again…”

Yes, this was going to mean taking money OUT of OUR pockets - but you know what? WE screwed up and we needed to make it up to everyone who’s time was wasted.

So, we did it.

The end result?

Believe it or not, but we are actually MORE respected in the industry for it. Almost a “blessing in disguise” - I said ALMOST.

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Lesson of the day: Sometimes you need to turn the salesman off. Accept what happened, stick your tail between your legs and own up to it. Be HONEST.

You’ll be surprised how far honesty with others can take you. Most humans, by nature, are incredibly forgiving - all you have to do is ask for their forgiveness.

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Tags: honesty, truth

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 12:23 am and is filed under Conflict Resolution, Dealing With People, Overcome Obstacles, Personal Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.