Introduction
For more than 30 years now, as prospector and business relations professionals, the analogy with “Chinese plates” has regularly imposed itself on us.
Indeed, we measure and know the energy required to launch a prospecting campaign, to create solid and fluid professional links, encouraged by exchange and trust….., all these “little” things that build a lasting and constructive relationship.
This period of intense digitalization and confinement questions our commercial methods, our customer relations, as well as the regular support to be produced and information to be communicated in order to keep this rotation (to keep this analogy to the Chinese plates thrown in their convolutions) alive and secure.
Chinese plates
It is therefore a real question and a deep reflection in this current period: How can we avoid that this fragile plate, which sometimes took us months or even years to launch into its beautiful rotation, maintained with constant attention by a regular addition of energy, when the need arises, but not too much and not too strongly…. is not falling back due to a lack of contact, discussion or support ?
Does the current dehumanization condemn our profession as a shopkeeper, which we practice with fervor and passion, to let our computer or mobile phone filter and dematerialize the care we give to our porcelain on chopsticks?
We think not. On the contrary, this period, destabilizing if it is, force us to do so.
Creativity and good mood, the pleasure of continuing to drink a coffee together, even from a distance, are motors that we wish to activate.
Seeing our interlocutor’s cat climbing up on his desk, a child laughing in an adjacent room, a library full of books and magazines, a photo, a painting, hanging on the wall…., all these little slices of life and little joys (let’s not hide the positive points that this situation can bring us) that we never had in our professional relationships in the world before, rehumanize a bond that nevertheless obliges us to stay away from each other.
The organisation of discussions and presentations, using new tools that we discover every day, open to the greatest number or targeted to one of our partners, are developing rapidly.
No doubt something will remain of this tomorrow. At the very least, a real reflection on our frenetic travels and journeys which used to fill our agendas, and which gave us this feeling, real or fantasized, of efficiency, of importance and of only doing one’s job well when on the move.
The “movement” is in the revival of the plate, with a little flick of the wrist, and not in an endless agitated race around all this equipment in precarious balance, at the risk of sometimes bringing everything down.
The moment is to regain small gestures, energetic but economical, efficient, and precise on the moment.
Learning is simple and complex at the same time. But it will allow us to rediscover the essence of what builds a commercial relationship: a simple, yet solid, professional, yet human link, that we will be able to rediscover at its true value after having greatly missed it.
