You have an email address. But what if people misspell your name?

I just had an email confirmation sent to me. I regularly have confirmations sent to me so I thought nothing of it.

Until I saw the spelling:

My name was misspelled. It happens all the time. Even though I spell out my name “M – A – R – C,” people type in the more common spelling (with Mark ending in a “k”).

So back when I set up my email, I also set up other emails addresses with common misspellings. These forward to my main email. That helps me catch important emails like this one.

Is your team missing out on sales?

You may be wondering, “Ok, Marc. What does a post about email have to do with leadership?”

I’d ask you: have you made it ridiculously easy for prospects and clients to communicate with your team?

Names are important. And expecting people to spell our names correctly isn’t asking too much.

But people will make mistakes.

As a leader, is it more important to you to communicate with people or is it more important to be right?

If “communicating with people” is your the answer, then ask your team if there are common misspellings of their names. And consider having additional email addresses created to forward to their correct email.

BONUS TIP: Your Website gets misspelled too

Look at your company URL too. Are there possibilities for misspelling?

For us, people sometimes spell “leadership” as “leaderhip” – missing the “s.” (A colleague once told me that means we put the “hip” in “leadership”!) We could make a big deal about it being their fault that they got it wrong. But that isn’t a fight we’re interested in having.

Instead, we chose to also register ConcordLeaderhipGroup.com so that anyone making that mistake will be redirected to our site.

What ways do you use tech to make you and your team easy to connect with?