Imagine This

Your company’s two biggest customers are in town for only a few hours. You must trust your new marketing executive to entertain one customer at lunch, while you show the other customer around your facilities, as he has requested. Surely this won’t be a problem for your new guy, right? Despite his youth, he is sharp and motivated and has grown your customer base rapidly since his arrival.

Later in the afternoon, you receive a call that confirms that you were right to have been worried. The customer you left to dine with your new marketing director called, to let you that he waited alone in the restaurant for your new marketing executive to arrive and was told not to order the steak because it was too expensive. He sat looking at his dining napkin on the table during the entire meal, and was left to finish his dessert alone. He had to take care of the bill, because his host dashed out to another meeting.

Obviously, this customer is going to take his business elsewhere. Can you blame him? That energetic, young marketing director is going to have to work four times as hard to make up for losing this customer!

Ten years ago, young executives were expected to bring table manners to the job with them. Nowadays, families are so busy that table manners are no longer being taught; which makes it necessary to teach new hires acceptable dining etiquette before sending them out to represent the company at a customer lunch or business dinner.

A Dining Etiquette Presentation reviews what is expected in these settings. Table manners essentials are covered in an entertaining and often amusing manner. Everything is covered, including Invitation Protocol, Host and Guest Duties, Taking Your Seat and Napkins, Toasting – You Are in the Spotlight, Posture at the Table and Excusing Yourself, Styles of Eating – American, Continental and Asian, Silverware Knowledge, Eating Different Foods, When and How to Pass Food, and Appropriate Dining Conversation. The skills that are outlined will help you get noticed for what you do well, not ignored because of what you do poorly. It lets “you shine through.”