How often we hear people say “you can’t judge a book by it’s cover”, but the fact is that we do exactly that all the time.  The more fitting maxim would the the Roman saw, ex ungue leonem, from the claw, the lion (also translated as “the lion shall be known by his claw”, but I think Merriam-Webster is correct).

The hard truth is that we make snap judgements about people and businesses all the time, and we generally are making those judgements off a lot less than the cover of a book.  It could be a business card, any single page of your website, an invoice, a pamphlet, the logo on the side of your truck, the sign on the front of the building, and the people who work for us. 

Mary Schmidt posted “Marketing is Every Piece of Paper” yesterday in a follow up to the piece she wrote the other day about brochures that prompted my “Business Card as Brochure” post.  As always, she’s right on target…

Every piece of paper – or any type of communique to anyone – is a marketing opportunity!

We are judged by every contact we have with our customers, and it resolves down to a decision matrix in which every “no” has a line drawn directly to “go away and never come back.”  It’s hard to get a new customer to become a repeat customer, or even to have them make that buying decision the first time, but it is simple to get them to walk away.

Take a look at everything you send out today and ask yourself if you’d want to be judged on it alone…