{"id":503,"date":"2009-01-13T18:16:17","date_gmt":"2009-01-14T00:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/000503"},"modified":"2009-01-14T10:17:33","modified_gmt":"2009-01-14T16:17:33","slug":"holiday-gifts-and-why-moore-consulting-sends-chocolate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/503","title":{"rendered":"Holiday gifts and why Moore Consulting sends chocolate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve started a tradition of sending my clients a holiday gift. They all seem to appreciate it and I plan to continue for the foreseeable future.  Sending these gifts is good for my business because the gift (in decreasing importance):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>shows my clients that I appreciate them.  I do good work, but lots of people do good work, and I want to show my clients how much I appreciate the opportunity to do business with them.  Giving them a gift, no matter how expensive, pales in comparison to the amount I&#8217;ve billed them over the year.<\/li>\n<li>strengthens the relationship.  I&#8217;m selling not just the product of my time, but myself, and expressing gratitude shows another side of me that clean, well written requirements just can&#8217;t.<\/li>\n<li>makes me stand out, at least among other software contractors.  This is only anecdotal, but I have had clients remark on how few of their contractors send any kind of gift or card.<\/li>\n<li>reminds my clients about me&#8211;some of the recipients might have not heard from me in months, so the gift is a reminder of my services.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s also good for me, for the following reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Gratitude feels good<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s fun to pick out gifts<\/li>\n<li>Going over invoices to get addresses serves as an excuse to review all the work I&#8217;ve done, as well as goals I may or may not have accomplished.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In 2008, I picked chocolates from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itsonlynaturalgifts.com\/\">It&#8217;s Only Natural Gifts<\/a>, because I wanted to support a local company and their product looked good.  They made it easy; all I had to do was give them a spreadsheet with client addresses, messages and type of gifts, and a credit card number. I also sent a card to a client that I did a small amount of business with.<\/p>\n<p>I recommend doing this for your clients next time the holidays come around.<\/p>\n<p>[tags]holiday gratitude[\/tags]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve started a tradition of sending my clients a holiday gift. They all seem to appreciate it and I plan to continue for the foreseeable future. Sending these gifts is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-consulting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}