Asking for Better Work from Your Boss

The techniques for building and maintaining goodwill apply not only to external messages, such as messages to customers; they also apply to internal messages, even$-$or perhaps especially$-$messages to readers who outrank you within your organization. Whoever your reader, striving to evoke a positive response will be well worth the effort.

The goal of this exercise is to demonstrate your ability to apply the followifing principles in an email to your boss.

$-$Use the you$-$viewpoint.

$-$Use a conversational style that has the right level of formality and avoids "rubber stamps."

$-$Employ positive language to achieve goodwill and other desired effects.

$-$Use positive emphasis.

Read the case and answer the questions that follow.

It has been five years since you graduated from college with a degree in marketing, and you're pleased with your career so far. Immediately after graduation, you landed a job as an accounts specialist on the sales team of a large corporation that manufactures consumer products. During your time on the job, you have kept your current clients happy and have also acquired a few new accounts. It's a long way to the top from here, but this is a company that likes to promote from within, and you believe that your future is bright.

One of your achievements is that you have become an active member of your state's chapter of the American Marketing Association. In fact, together with two other members, you'll be giving a presentation at the organization's national meeting in Seattle this year. Your group's talk will be on the topic of "Maintaining Customer Loyalty Through Social Media," and the presenters will discuss strategies their companies are using. Each presenter's talk will also include comments from a top executive in the company about the use and importance of social media marketing in his or her company.

When your presentation was accepted for the conference program six months ago, you emailed Brad Diggs, your company's VP of sales and marketing, to ask if he'd be willing to share his thoughts about the importance of social media in sales and marketing. He said he'd be glad to$.$ But you had to send him two email reminders to get him to send you his comments, which he finally did today, only three days before you leave for the conference.