Lost a nice assignment

Long Yongtu

People who know me will realize that this weblog is not only going to be a good news show. We are learning fast at Chinabiz Speakers and by sharing our learning curve with our network, we hope it all makes us wiser.

Most assignments have a lead time of two, three months and when it involves celebrities even longer. But at the beginning of this project we have already gotten a few panic-assignments. Promised speakers call off or after arriving in China, business delegations discover nasty holes in their program.

One of those "help us fast" assignments failed today. An European conference organizer was trying to find a celebrity speaker for the beginning of December. At the end of August I talked to them and realized that former WTO-negotiator Long Yongtu would be an ideal match for this client. We had been talking to his office before about his speaking engagements and knew how to work with them. To our surprise, Mr. Long was still available for a key note speech at such a relative short notice. But the client, used to free speakers, was taken away by the price and took more than two weeks to come back to us, reluctantly agreeing. We got in touch with Mr. Long's office again, but now we learned he was fully booked till the end of 2007.

In August, we did not want to look to pushy, but we should at least have made very clear that any delay could mean that we could not close the deal anymore. It is very hard to find a good balance between not looking too aggressive, while still getting this kind of fast deals done.