Win More Ad Agency New Business by NOT Asking Your Prospects to Call You
Treating your prospects with respect and showing consideration for their time demonstrates your professionalism
How many times have you listened to cold calls in your voicemail and actually called the salesperson back? If you're like me, you never do. And why should you? What right does a salesperson have, who is trying sell you something you probably don't want, to ask you to call them?
You get the picture. Yet, from my experience with hundreds of different types of sales and new business people over twenty+ years, I estimate that more than 90% of them ask the person they're calling to call them back.
In the early days of selling here at The List, the founder of the company, Morgan Shorey, got to thinking about this concept and started playing with the idea of not expecting or even asking prospects to call her back. In her opening statement she might say, “Hi Bob, this is Morgan calling from The List and you don't need to call me back.” Guess what? People were so surprised by the professionalism and respect of this approach that some of them actually did call back!
We started to experiment further with the new business professionals at First Visits (now part of Catapult New Business) in their approaches to corporate marketers on behalf of our ad agency clients. As part of our voicemail series we would not leave our telephone number or ask any marketer to call us back until they knew something about the agency and specifically why we were calling. It could take weeks to build up that level of rapport via voicemail.
We've learned this over the last eight years: by not asking your prospect to call you back, you are:
- Showing respect for the fact that you are interrupting them
- Recognizing that they are really busy
- Recognizing that getting in touch with them is your responsibility
- With persistence you will prove to them that they should want to talk to you
I recommend that you or your new business person try this approach, and then hope you'll let me know how it works.
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