Executive Gifts - A Food Hamper to Remember
19.May, 2009
As a virtual p.a. clients often ask me to source executive gifts for their clients. It can be a fairly hard task given that you don’t necessarily know your client or your client’s client very well. This is where I find a food Hamper can come across as a very thoughtful gift if you tailor it to your clients likes and dislikes as well as their clients likes and dislikes.
What you need to do is to compare your client’s personal profile, their business profile and their client’s profile so that you can generate a list of options for your client’s approval. Two important things to bear in mind before you start and whilst your task is in progress:
- Your cultural gift ideas may differ to those of your clients or the client’s client. You have to do your research really carefully because it is your client’s reputation that is at stake.
- If your client’s client works for a large corporation you need to check out their guidelines for corporate gifts. You should also check out any local, state or national laws covering such gifts.
Keeping the above information in mind here are some tactics that you can employ to match the food hamper to the client’s client:
- Complete your standard client questionnaire form for the client’s client by carrying out some research; question your client, search on the internet, through local Chambers of Commerce and through the local business pages. If you are able, to you could even call the p.a. for the client’s client and make some tactful enquiries. This should help you identify some of their interests.
- Determine what sort of impression your client is trying to achieve i.e. casual, professional, chummy.
Once you have a completed profile you can start to make some educated guesses about the type of food hamper to send. As in all business transactions quality and a personal and professional touch is key. The gifts that you source must be of high quality and they must be appropriate to the person that is going to receive it e.g. do not send alcohol to someone that doesn’t drink, do not assume that because they are in business they play golf, make sure that the food hamper is Halal or Kosher where necessary.
Once you have a shortlist of food hampers, send the options for your suggested gifts to your client for final approval. At this point you should discuss the presentation and delivery method ensuring that these options are as personal as possible and culturally appropriate.
This should get you through this thorny topic and ease some of the anxiety that can form whilst trying to complete this type of task.