A cardinal sin

I (try to) regularly attend a variety of Meetup (*see below for a description) groups, for learning and professional and social networking. Basically, you can find a group of people who have similar interests: books, kids, art, food, sports - something for almost everyone.

Mostly, I appreciate deeply the effort of the organizers, and I have no issue if they personally benefit.

What I abhor, though,
is an organizer who uses the Meetup group to make a bad sales pitch, like the one my wife just attended. The subject was finance, and she would have been OK with a pitch - if the organizer had known what he was talking about. But he didn't (my wife knew far more than he did). He committed a cardinal sin: he wasted her time.

What a shame. He got a dozen people to come to his office, with the promise of learning something useful, at no real cost - a marketer's dream. Had he delivered, he would have developed a good prospect list.

But he got lazy - he assumed that all he had to do was get the people in the room, and then start closing. What he did was ensure that none of the attendees would ever buy from him or his firm.

Client focus matters.
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*From the website: "Meetup is the world's largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group, or find one of the thousands already meeting face-to-face. More than 9,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities."