How One Poorly Communicated Message Cost Me $500

I’m sure if you’ve been in business any length of time you’ve encountered a scam of some kind where basically someone is trying to get money from you and providing no service or product.

We had been notified by DQ about a scam and had sent out an email to all the store managers asking them to post this and talk to their shift leaders.

In one store the notice was posted next to the phone, but the manager didn’t get a chance to talk to the shift leader and . . .

Someone successfully reached one of our young shift leaders at a DQ and convinced them that one of the managers was in trouble and they needed to send $500 in cash to them right away in the form of a prepaid Visa card.

Now you may wonder how this can happen. It sounds ridiculous even when I’m writing it. Why would someone be calling a different store than the manager works at and asking for money?

Well from experience, I can tell you that the scammers are good at this. I’ve been on the receiving end of calls like this, in fact, only a year ago I got one. It was when they switched to you needed to send cash right now that I knew it was a scam.

The scammers are skilled and I don’t blame the supervisor or the manager that it happened to. But what I am wondering about is communication.

There was a notice by the phone about this scam and it had been happening to other DQ’s.

We thought we had communicated a warning about this to every store. We assumed that the message had been heard.

Well, that didn’t work out well for us.

What about your marketing message? Have you communicated it to everyone? Have they heard it?

Many times, we think we’ve told everyone and we stop communicating our core message. And do you know what? Most haven’t heard it yet.

One of my clients is a resort and they were closed due to COVID for almost 10 weeks.

They made changes and reopened and for the next 3 weeks communicated in their advertising that they were open and the changes they’ve made.

After that, they decided to change their messaging.

We were talking this week and do you know what people who had called wanted to know?

  1. Are you open?
  2. What are you doing to make sure we stay safe?

They had spent 1000s of dollars communicating those two messages over most of a month and still, people didn’t know the answer.

Both the above examples show that people need to hear your message many more times than you think they do.

After all, shouldn’t you be able to tell someone something once and they “get it”?

From what I see and have seen many other times in the past, it takes multiple repetitions to get your message heard no matter who you’re talking to – your spouse, your kids, your team members, or your customers.

To be successful you need to communicate your message over and over and over.

Have a great day!

Brian “How Many Times Have I Said That” Hahn

P.S. Have you signed up for your Double Your Sales Discovery Session? If you have an established business and you’re looking for a system that provides predictable and consistent growth, schedule your DYS Discovery visit. It’s Free. Click Here to schedule.