Sales calls trump email

Direct phone calls trump responsive email.

Every sales representative gets buried under floods of email. The effort to decipher what customer’s mean, what they need, what their angle is, etc. can easily take one’s entire day. What appears a simple request can lead into a rabbit trail of well-meaning but unanswered questions, misunderstandings, and rising discontent. To mitigate this, Sambucci’s constant rule is to “PICK UP THE PHONE (Sambucci, pg. 17).”

When a customer contacts an entrepreneur, their first request is often reasonable “Can you send me this,” or, “Do you offer that”. The entrepreneur may have the very thing on hand they’ve requested and, eager to make a customer happy (or to check off another email) may acquiesce with an email response. When an entrepreneur does this; however, they miss an opportuntity to understand their customer’s needs, to build rapport, and to learn about how his product is being used. Often that simple request hides a number of assumptions that a five-minute phone conversation could have identified.

I’ve been in the customer-facing role for eight months now, and this insight has grown in importance. I spend more time now than I ever expected to on the phone with customers for any number of reasons. To my surprise, I’ve actually begun to prefer these conversations over email! The time saved is enormous, the chance to put a voice and identity to a name is priceless, and I get the change to “Speak human” in a way that email, even with emoticons, cannot (Sambucci, pg 65). With a host of new questions and a fresh perspective on my role in hand, I want to put a higher value on phone communication early and often, along with better customer research.

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