Got a Good Reason to Call Your Customer?

Staying in contact with your prospects and customers keeps your business flowing steadily. If you want to be considered a thought leader and trusted partner, you need to routinely bring new, relevant, and valuable ideas to your customers.

Calling to say, “I want an appointment with you so that I can show you my latest product” gets a quick, “No, thanks” because no one is sitting at their desk, waiting for the phone to ring, hoping it’s a salesperson.

You have to deliver timely, relevant value to get a sales conversation going. If you only call to make a sale, then they’ll resist your call. When you call to deliver value, they’ll always welcome your call.

Read on to discover ways to do this in your territory.

Deliver Relevant Information

The fastest way to connect with your prospects and customers is with relevant information, ideas that have meaningful impact, right now. You can do this with a little research for common problems or opportunities.

For example, CryptoLocker is a massive problem for businesses world wide. It infects computers and extorts money from those infected. Half of the hospitals world-wide have been infected and 30 percent of those have paid the ransom. Yet few companies seem to be doing anything about it.

If someone called saying, “If you’re concerned about CryptoLocker, I have three things you must do right now to protect yourself” what do you think you’d do? At least listen to what they had to say!

What wide-spread problem can you help solve? Call offering information about how to fix it and you have a good reason to talk with customers.

Offer Education

I learned decades ago that teaching my prospects how to buy what I sold created deals. That’s when I learned a critical insight, “The most dangerous thing to your competitor is a customer who’s educated.” You’ll hear this from me frequently because it’s your best competitive weapon.

Offer webinars, YouTube videos, articles, instruction sheets, and classes that teach your target market how to solve their problems. These sessions can’t be a pitch fest or you’ll never get customers to come back. Instead have them focus on the problem and possible solutions, including your offering. This builds confidence and enthusiasm, and they’ll buy.

Call (not email – you want a conversation) and invite customers to your event or let them know that you have a YouTube channel that can help them solve problems fast. You’d be delighted about what that call will uncover in sales opportunities.

Introduce a New, Disruptive Product

Disruptive products create new outcomes that weren’t possible before. We are surrounded by disruptive products: smart phones, Amazon.com, and Uber to name three. These products make life simpler, let us do what we want to do frictionlessly, and we’d not voluntarily do without them. Bringing disruptive products to your customers creates real value for them, and you.

For example, a new, disruptive product that I’ve recently seen is Joan Assistant, a solution for scheduling meeting rooms as easily as scheduling a conference call. I’ve been frustrated when trying to find an open meeting room, or locating that the room I thought as open but wasn’t available. Joan Assistant solves these problems. I wrote an article about the product, read it here, including how you can offer it to your customers.

This is an interesting product because it opens conversations with the “gatekeeper.” Use an conversation starter like this: “I know that you’re always looking for ways to make your life easier, so here’s a new product that I think you’d like to know about. You can schedule a meeting room as easily as a conference call. You book meeting rooms from your calendar app and it automatically changes the digital sign outside the room so that everyone knows they’re in the right place. It’s a real time and headache saver and is quite affordable. Would you like to take a closer look?”

Create a solid conversation starter that delivers real value and you’ll have a good reason to have a conversation with your customer.

Always have a good reason to talk with your customers and they’ll be glad to talk with you.

Mark S A Smith