Clients not responding? To-Do list full of ‘waiting-for’ items for people who have not emailed you back yet? Training Expert Hannah Keep reminds us of the basics – picking up the phone, getting in touch directly and rebuilding rapport and relationships.
For one week I stopped spending my time posting articles and got back in touch with my clients using the telephone. Yes that dusty thing that we only pick up if it rings or if (God forbid) our Internet is down. I was amazed at the results not just from a business perspective from how I felt having made personal connections with my clients. I too had fallen into the habit of doing business by email, trying to resolve conflict by email or just generally being lazy by answering questions that would have been quicker for me to pick up the phone and answer. Why? I just got into the habit of doing it that way.
When I used to work in Sales, there was no internet and we had to send literature to clients by fax. This of course meant us leaving our desk and standing by the fax machine which if we were seen to be there too much meant a reprimand from our manager. Why? We were selling by fax which has of course now turned into selling by email. Clients will email us questions, they will email us objections and sometimes they might not reply at all which we guess to mean that they aren’t interested or have gone else where with their business.
We need to start picking up the phone again. We can’t build rapport over email, we can’t sell ourselves effectively on an email and we can’t build trust with a client over email. It amazes me when I work with organisations how much internal conflict is cause by mis reading the words or tonality of an email or how much time is wasted by people emailing each other who sit two desks away – to build relationships takes time and to do this takes effort – close down your computer and pick up the phone.
Scarily enough social media has now brought about another way of doing business. Except it isn’t selling and the secret rules of some of these sites such as Twitter is that you do anything but sell or talk about what you do because this puts people off and is bad ‘etiquette’. Now I’m not one of these people who is against such sites as I love Twitter and keeping in touch via Linked In, I just think we need to remember how powerful the phone is and how much of the rapport we lose via posts, blogs and tweets.
Look at your client list today.
To find more about how to sell YOU, come along to our next workshop Selling YOU workshop.
image by ~seb
