Traps to avoid if you want your prospects to stick around past the handshake
#2 in a series.
Trap #2. Congratulate a woman for running a business.
As of 2007, women owned 28.7% of all non-farm businesses in the United States. They’re executives, managers, and decision-makers with influence and purchasing power in many more. So it’s no wonder that a lot of b-to-b marketers are targeting women business leaders.
But sometimes that noble intent is ruined by lousy execution. And one of the easiest ways to turn off women business leaders is to congratulate them for being women business leaders.
Women over 40 will be insulted – how long have we been doing this? Younger women — Millennials — will be baffled. Many of the women they know, including their mothers and grandmothers, work, and many of these role models are business owners.
Consider these two messages, both real. The first is a rare stumble from a company that normally does a good job of talking to women, and in fact, that does a good job on the rest of this site. Unfortunately, the stumble is on the site’s home page.
The advent of companies led by women has been one of the most significant changes in the world of business and in the world itself. Female leadership of companies has—and is—changing how businesses are organized, managed, and insured. At Aetna, we’ve witnessed these realities firsthand.
Our work with women-led companies has taught us that the idea of communities—places where different people come together to share interests, goals, and values—is central to their success. This is how we have developed the benefit plans and the actual tools needed to serve the health and well-being of companies led by women.
We urge you to consider this website an online community, one where you can get the information you need for the health of the business community you lead.
The second message is from a business letter:
We’ve been friends since we were girls, and you know I love you like a sister.
But we both also know that your husband is an ass, and he’s wrong when he says that I’m overcharging for those beds you purchased for your inn.
I’m sending my employee over this afternoon to collect on the debt. Please give him the money you owe me.
The first message is verbatim. I paraphrased the second; for example, where I used “employee” and “money”, the original used “servant” and “shekels”. In 1908, archeologists from Columbia University found this letter, inscribed on a clay tablet, in a trash heap behind the shop of a Babylonian scribe. It’s 4,000 years old.
Interestingly, the Aetna message seems to have been written by scientists, too: anthropologists. Not marketers…or insurance specialists…or people who have met women business leaders…or people who have met women. Aetna has “witnessed” the quaint beliefs of the culture under study, and has learned the “idea of communities”. (It even defines ”community”, and a good thing, too. Otherwise, how would we ever know the name of that thing we build? Thank you, Aetna! ) Now Aetna is prepared to help the adorable but helpless natives by building a ready-made online community just for us! They even tell us how to think about it! Woo-hoo!
It’s too bad, too, because the site has good content, organized in a way that is useful for women business owners, with categories like “Healthy Business,” “Healthy Family, and ” Healthy Life”.
And it’s kind of ridiculous, considering the irrefutable evidence of the second message. Women have been running businesses for at least 4,000 years, and probably a lot longer than that — probably as long as there have been businesses. I don’t know anything about the Babylonian woman business owner who wrote that dunning letter, but I’ll bet that she had something else in common with modern women: the urge to roll her eyes whenever someone congratulated her for simply being in business.
