Be Effective with Telephones and E-mail

How to make that telephone call turn into money.

Let us assume that you are intending to telephone someone you have met at a networking event to set up an appointment. If you are a bit like me and you really do not enjoy having to pick up the phone and cold call someone, this can be a tough task. We all want to be liked, and hence do not take rejection too well. In fact we begin to fear being rejected by prospects. However, it is a fear that you will have to conquer if you are to turn telephone calls into cash. Now don’t make a bunch of excuses when the designated telephone time arrives. You must embrace it and make it a habit but most of all, you should follow my simple tips and the task will get a little easier. Yes, the recipient of some of your polite, well intentioned calls may be having a bad day and he or she may take their frustrations out on you, but the telephone still remains one of the main connectors today and is still more effective than e-mail in setting up appointments. The telephone can pretty much guarantee faster and more personal interactivity than e-mail can when scheduling an appointment with a prospect. Imagine trying to set up an appointment with a stranger via e-mail?  You will probably be treated as a spammer, that is, someone who sends multiple e-mails out to no-one in particular.

I think the uncertainty of what you are going to say to your prospect and the uncertain responses you could get back from them often give rise to the fear. The good news is that there are two very simple things that you can do to help alleviate your fears. Many of us will have a photograph of a loved one on our desks at our offices. What you could do with this photograph is to set it up in the near vicinity of your phone so that you could pretend that you are speaking to this person whenever you are in fact calling a prospect. This simple little trick helps to settle your nerves when you make that telephone call. If you have a loved one but don’t have a photograph of them in your workspace perhaps you should arrange one. After all, we typically spend less time awake with our spouses than we do with our work colleagues. Your spouse or loved ones deserve to take pride of place by your phone and you deserve better success by having placed the photograph at that spot.

To ensure a pleasant vocal quality, I suggest that you should smile as you dial the prospects number or whenever you take a call from a prospect. This is especially important if it is your intention to secure appointments with them. You improve your chances of success by sounding pleasant and interesting. Try and be the type of someone that they might want to talk further with. You might still face rejection when your prospects are having a bad day, or if they are not interested in what you have to say. Perhaps some might have a great relationship with a competitor, or they simply don’t have the time to spend with you at that very moment. It is vital that you don’t take this rejection personally and then carry on making telephonic approaches with this disappointed inflection in your voice. Prospects pick up on this and would be more likely to turn down an appointment with you especially if they can hardly wait to get you off of the phone before you ruin their day with your negativity. It’s hard to sound disappointed if you are honestly smiling. Let me prove to you that there is good reason to smile. Let us assume that the following ratios are true of your sales talents. Out of every ten people that you phone you make five appointments and you successfully close two deals that average R1 000 in commission. You are therefore making R2 000 in commission out of every ten people that you phone. That is R200 per phone call! That should encourage you to be more positive and enthusiastic about making those calls and securing the appointment.

When you do telephone a prospect to make an appointment, remember that an appointment is all that you are trying to achieve. You are not trying to sell your product or service over the phone at the same time. You should avoid the conversation from steering off in that direction or face loosing the appointment or your sales edge. How can you start pushing your product as a solution when you don’t yet fully understand the client’s problem? Should this happen the easiest way to correct it is to smile and say something like “It certainly looks as if we are starting to have our (15 minute / half hour) appointment over the phone! Can we rather agree to discuss this face-to-face where I can also show you what it looks like, how it works, perhaps even bring you a demonstration model to look at?  How are you placed on Tuesday at say 10H00 or would 12H00 suit you better?

Once you have secured the appointment, always thank the prospect for agreeing to meet with you. I find it helpful if you can send some information on yourself, some testimonials from your existing satisfied clients and perhaps a brochure of your services or selected products that you feel will benefit your prospect and that can serve as a starting point of your discussions when you meet. If you are not successful at securing the appointment you can still send this information to your prospect “for their records”. This can be sent immediately via e-mail which is often impressive, or by snail-mail which is less so. Some prospects will read what you have sent them and others will toss it away; don’t let this deter you. I tend to prefer the route of impressing the prospect by sending a standard prepared e-mail document immediately after the discussion. Admittedly, some prospects may not have a permanent connection to the internet, but those who do will be impressed at your efficiency and will reward this ingenuity by reading what you have sent them. Make sure your testimonials from satisfied clients’ stand out and grab their attention. Those you impress are likely to phone you to schedule an appointment.

Don’t only phone prospects when you want something from them. There is much to be said and gained from contacting prospects on the basis of ‘staying in touch’ until something comes up that could be of benefit to both your prospect and yourself. An unyielding secret to successful networking is staying in touch with prospects that may be of value to you now, and if not now, most possibly in your near future.

In the age of the cell phone and answering machine, you might often be asked to leave a message when your prospect is unavailable to take your call. This is not the time to panic and hit the End-Call button. Instead, you can use this opportunity to stir your prospects interest by giving them your key reason for having phoned them as part of your message. For example, let us say that your product can reduce the average company’s printing costs by thirty percent. Your message to your prospect could follow the lines of “Hello James, Gavin Bramley here, from Bramley Printers and Cartridges. We met last month at the Speed Networking Session. I’m sorry I’ve missed you as I was wanting to share with you how I’ve saved a number of your colleagues some thirty percent off their monthly printing costs. If you are interested in how I’ve done it, give me a call on 083-777-xxxx!” The advertising industry calls this a teaser. It is designed to prompt action on the part of the recipient, so it needs to contain something in the message that the receiver perceives as being worth their while to respond to and hence, call you back.

If you are on the receiving end of a call back, that is, you leave messages on your own phone that your prospects and clients might hear, please make them professional and change them often! Enough said.