The Blatant Truth Weblog

Hello. Is Anyone Home?

Hello. Is Anyone Home?

So you’re in the city or business district in your community. Look around you. How many offices are in your immediate vicinity? 5,10,20 or more. If you’re like me and in NYC, at any given time and on any given street, you might see buildings soaring 50 stories or more and well, there are a vast quantity of low rise buildings as well.

So what’s up? With all these offices and purportedly all of the people that work in these offices, where, oh where, are the prospects?

You know what I mean. You call and reach voice mail. You call again and the same thing occurs. And again. And then again. What’s going on? Well, nada.

No one is home. Or is there. You don’t know do you?

There are no pat solutions to this problem but there ARE a few things that you can do to help improve your “reach rate”. Here are just a few:

1) Place your calls early in the morning, after “traditional” office hours or even at lunch. You may have a better chance of having the prospect pick up their phone at these “odd” times. During the busy part of the day that now seems to stretch from 9-5 with few exceptions, getting to someone before his or her day has started or after it has ended is often successful.
2) Deploy email after the 2nd or 3rd attempt. Mention that you’ve tried to reach them by phone to no avail and that you would like to schedule a phone appointment. Give them specific dates and times and make it easy for them to hit “reply” and give their okay.
3) Send “snail mail” and time your phone call to follow the mail by just a day or two. And, try to make your mail interesting and unique. This is where dimensional mail or a specialty item might come in useful. (Of course you will have somehow already screened and qualified these prospects. You don’t want to spend money on expensive items without being somewhat certain that the prospect has a degree of sales worthiness.
4) Make sure that you leave an excellent voice mail that may even prompt a prospect to call you back. Callbacks are rare even when the message is good but it doesn’t hurt to give it your best shot. And, when given the opportunity by the phone system, take a moment to listen to your message. How do you sound? Is your tone professional and energetic? Do you like the words that you are saying? This might be just the time to tweak your message.

It’s expensive and inefficient to attempt to do in-person cold calls and here in Manhattan, you can’t get past security anyway.

And really, since no one is “home” isn’t it more efficient to fine-tune and perfect your telephone prospecting skills. Try some of these tips and see if you are able to “connect”. Good luck.