The Company Christmas Letter

The company I’m with now, as well as most of my previous ones, have kicked around the idea of having a company newsletter that we would send out regularly to keep in touch with customers. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of these kinds of things. The people you really want to be in touch with are normally important, busy people whose biggest problem is managing-down the oceans of data and inputs they receive to something manageable. Unless your monthly newsletter is a McKinsey Quarterly quality industry analysis, it’s going to look like spam. Don’t waste your time.

We’re just passing through the Diwali holiday season here in India which means that Christmas and the end of the year are approaching (for those of us using the Gregorian calendar). If you want an excuse for keeping in touch with customers, it seems to me that this would be a good time for the president or CEO of the company to write a short formal letter to those valued clients.

Now, in my experience there are two kinds of people in the world, people who write, photocopy and send out Family Christmas Letters to all their friends and relatives and people who hate these letters. The people in the latter category tend not to like them because they are impersonal letters masquerading as personal and because they are kind of boring (“Back in April, Suzy broke her arm  and Fido got second place in the local dog show”). So, let’s not make the same mistake with ours.

Here is my suggested structure for your end-of-year CEO letter:

• Thank you for your business
• Thank you for contributing to our success [quantify as turnover/expansion/profit]
• Our goals for next year are [in bullet form, these should be ones that resonate with customers and be real, quantifiable things that customers recognise will benefit them]
• We look forward to working with you in 2008, call me if I can be of assistance [CEO's direct phone number and email]

This letter should force you to think about what you are going to do better/faster/cheaper next year. It should make you write down, at least at a high level, how you are going to improve your relationship with your current customers next year. It should cause you to be creative and use your vision to anticipate your customer’s needs and it should force you to document and commit to some goals.