Consistency Paid Off

I have a few weekly columns in some local dailies. And the longest period of column I had ever written lasted three years, published every Monday, totaled 156 articles without a single lapse. Despite my busy work schedule, I still accepted an invitation from a tabloid to contribute critique once a week, and it has been a continuous eight months now.

Inconsistency has always killed any brilliant new plan halfway through. In the contrary, consistency is THE key to a successful implementation of any plans. I'm proud of our FingerTec monthly newsletter, since the first issue was published and disseminated in February 2007; we never missed a single issue over the past 3 years, despite the extra workload and rushing for deadline drew excessive pressure to our staff, when their hands were usually tight, and minds were usually prioritize with some other promises to customers.

Because of our persistence, we maintain consistency and we take care of the content’s quality at the same time. I witness many companies much larger than us, even with a team of dedicated sub-editors, normally had a fine start but slowly lost their momentum and passion as the time went by. We only have our team of sales and technical personnel contribute their writings and assist with the editing of the FingerTec monthly newsletter for the past three long years; and my gratitude to them is beyond words.

One close friend of mine once commented, “Consistency is important, but the virtue can be more valuable if you tie it with some sales strategies rather than a mere newsletter.”

“But newsletter is one of our very effective sales strategies,” I rebutted. The consistency of the newsletter is not just the only one thing we pursue. The fact that we never overlooked other areas such as the handling of sales and supports through our CRM system proves consistency. People shouldn’t be too shortsighted in business. Newsletter is a long-term commitment; an intimate relationship we build with our customers; the results might not be as straightforward but it’s beneficial in the long run.

FingerTec Newsletter, January 2010 issue

In fact, besides the regular updates of our latest developments, Newsletter helps us to win over some potential leads that are selling other biometric products. It also serves as the checkpoints for our staff to contribute technical tips and marketing information to enrich our support websites regularly. Without the monthly newsletter, I can expect very rare updates of our relevant support websites, and the excuses would never be short of supply. Our Newsletter also provides a platform for our resellers worldwide to publish their stories, to announce their successful projects and have the opportunity to share with the others their FingerTec experience at no cost at all.

We improve the contents and design of our newsletter from time to time, and we have been meeting our deadlines earlier in order to publish the volume from the middle to early of the month. Furthermore, the consistency we pursue has slowly turned the process of publishing our newsletter into a habit, and the burden also has been replaced by responsibility. And we expect reading of the newsletter would also become a habit to our resellers.

I dare say that the consistency of our newsletter has improved FingerTec® image tremendously. A distributor from Africa came to the office every half year and she brought with her printed pages of our newsletter and asking for further explanation and updates on various topics. I don’t have a statistic to prove my bold statement, but from feedbacks I received and from my gut feelings, I know that this is true. My logic is simple, I reckon many people believe that, if FingerTec is serious about something they deemed less important, what about those significant matters? Go figure.

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ