This topic is on handling special requests. If you’ve been online at any point in time, especially if you have a business or a blog or any type of presence online, big, small, whatever, chances are you get a few emails every once in awhile and some of them are special requests. This is a very broad word, but a special request could be, for example, sometimes I receive requests for, let’s say, the German translation for one of my tests or a companion portion of one of my products.
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Like another PDF to bundle with it. Really and truly, if you were to jump on every one of these without any type of evaluation, one it could be really overwhelming, and two you might not be focusing on the important stuff. The whole 80-20 thing, focusing on the 20% of what you actually need to do, to get 80% of the results that are actually having growth for you and everyone else that you interact with.
For my specific examples there, the language was very easy to do because I could just go in over the past year or two’s worth of data and see, “How many people are accessing the particular test from countries that speak German?” When you see that it’s less than a fraction of a very small % over the course of the year, you could say, “Probably not worth it,” unless you just really want to be present everywhere or want to move to that particular area.
Now, I know everything that you’re going to be looking at doesn’t have that specific of data that you can dive into or may not have a year’s worth of it, but if there’s any type of way you can objectively answer a special request like that, at least to yourself – because you don’t want to tell someone “Oh, I don’t want to do it because there’s not enough people that would use it.”
You’d say, “We don’t plan to have that language of the test available or that product available,” but it’s something to consider for the future. Usually it just about ends there. They might offer to help with it. If that aligns with what you want to do, then that’s fine. Just be cautious about what you’re signing up for.
Basically, if you’re confronted with a special request, you have to immediately consider, “Is this one of the 20% things I can do? Do I have time? Do I want to do it? And do I think it would be useful for my business as well as the people out there?” If it just seems absolutely ridiculous, you can be polite and give a real short rationale or, sorry to say, you can just ignore it.
I know a lot of people probably don’t want to hear that but people that are going out and making that request en masse are used to a low response rate. Even on email campaigns, you can ask any internet marketer – “Our response rates are in the single digit percentages.” It’s just something to expect.
Don’t be afraid to ignore things if it’s too difficult to respond to, or just do the nice thing and give a real quick professional reasoning as to why you’re not going to answer that special request and consider it done. File it away for special requests – maybe it’s an idea for the future, but consider it done and move along.