To Phone or Not to Phone?

That appears to be the question...

I learned another valuable business lesson yesterday regarding doing business with others on their terms and not mine.

I don’t know about you, but I hate annoying sales calls in the middle of my productive day. Nothing irks me more than interrupting a creative session to answer a call from someone who wants to sell me something. I’m usually not in the right frame of mind and if I’m on a deadline, they will most likely get the following response from me, “I’m sorry, I’m just not interested at this time…”. If they had sent me an email, they may have gotten a different response.

With former backgrounds in sales, Michelle and I both decided when we started our own business to be more on the “soft sell” side. We discussed the risks of not pushing for the sale and decided that the benefit of being the type of company that we wanted to be outweighed those risks. We thought people who were interested would buy and we wouldn’t have to be the annoying pushy salesperson that we were forced to be at our other positions in past years.

It appears that may have been a big mistake on our part…

Yesterday we were on-site meeting with one of our current clients. During our visit, the client mentioned that someone she had referred us to said that we hadn’t contacted him. We were stunned. Michelle had met with the client, sent a proposal and followed up twice with email. It turns out that the potential client doesn’t really read his emails. We "ass"umed that he was too busy and that he just wasn't interested at the time. We were wrong. The client perceived us as not contacting him and in turn hired another designer.

Ooops!

Our policy was to send a proposal via email and to follow up with a phone call after the client showed interest in pursing a business relationship by sending a reciprocal email or by calling us (as we requested in the email).

Our business model has failed us. How many other potential clients have we lost due to our assumption that people don’t want to be annoyed with phone calls? Where we thought we were helping our potential clients, we were actually hurting our bottom line. Our thinking was that our potential clients could read and respond to our emails or proposals at a time that was convenient for them, rather than interrupt their busy workday with our sales pitch.

Another item to take into consideration is our industry. Most designers and programmers prefer to communicate via email and live chat. Many of us have instant messaging and emails sent to our phones, whereas most likely our clients don’t. Even though the Internet is an essential part of our business, it may not be to our clients.

I am curious though, do you prefer to have email or phone calls when it comes to sales? I’m going to create a poll to find out your answers. Please take the time to weigh in (over on the right hand side of this blog post near the top).

Moving forward, we’re changing our business model and we’ll be spending more time on the phone and less time emailing prospective clients.

Joanne