No Reply to Emails Speaks Volumes About Your Relationships

How often have you sent an email to a customer or colleague and got no reply whatsoever? It's not uncommon, but the silence still says something to you about how they view their relationship with you. Think about the assumptions people make about your perceptions of the relationship you have with them, when you do the same.

Not getting a reply to an email may be because, although you're not going to like this, they're not interested enough in what you have to offer, or you're not important enough for them to value your communication to reply.

Generally, silence from the respondent means no interest and if they do reply, the speed with which they do so will quite often depend upon the value they place upon your importance to them.

When they say "Sorry, I didn't get back to you sooner" the sub-text is saying they had far more important matters to attend to and you were at the back of the queue.

The hierarchy of email within a company tells a lot about the people in it. Researchers at Columbia University have trawled through Enron records and found it is not always the most important and visible people in a company whose emails were responded to most quickly. It's more likely their PA's or executive assistants who were ranked higher than the better paid executives they supported â€"- these gatekeepers were the ones to impress.

The point is, with all this information now available, what to do if your email isn't answered? Do you keep pressing Send or give up?

Do you think that eventually they will respond if you shower them with emails, if only to shut you up, or will they become more aggravated with you and begin to think of you as a spammer with no business integrity?

If you have had a successful meeting with someone who promised to return to you with some information or to follow up further and you hear absolutely nothing, you should be quite justified in asking them to respond.

However, at this point if you get no reply, what goes through your mind?

• Were you not as popular as you thought?
• Have they left the company?
• Have they gone with someone else?
• Were they, in fact, not actually senior enough to make that critical decision and were simply tyre-kickers enjoying their hold over you?

Imagine then that you are in the reverse situation, and you are receiving personally written emails from a supplier, if you never respond to their requests for a conversation what is it doing to your personal brand in their eyes? There may be several hundred people out there all holding a grudge against you.

Michael Hyatt, the head of Thomas Nelson Publishers, suggests you set up an email template you can use to give them advice about what your company's standpoint is on particular product or service pitches the right person and the right department to target sales pitches.

Mentally turn the tables on the person writing to you and ask yourself how you would feel in their shoes with your non-response or bland 'out of the office' response which can be very abrupt, isn't particularly courteous, and gives nothing and says nothing good about you or your business.

(Pic: Katie Tegtmeyer cc2.0)