Artur Orudzhaliev raised a good topic about unnecessary calls in his post “What is a mobile phone for?”
I also get quite a lot of calls, mostly offers to buy something or use someone’s services. And my most frequent answer is: “Thanks, could you send all this to my email?”
I understand these people: they’re sales managers who are taught that they need to “get through” to the client. And email is a low-contact medium that, as a rule, also gives no feedback (whether anyone got your email, read it, whether this is even the person who makes the decision).
But at the same time I get angry with them for distracting me from work and rest. Which, you’ll agree, does little for our business relationship.
I’ll venture that my not taking in information by ear comes from some psychological or nervous traits of mine. I suppose that I, like many people, am a text person. Text people take in information well when it’s presented as, attention, text. It’s easy to guess that Orudzhaliev, a journalist, is a text person too.
If you want to be a good sales manager, it wouldn’t hurt to find out how a potential client takes in information and serve it to him prepared that way. Some people are better called, some written to, and for some you should draw an infographic.
Since all of this is very individual, such tailoring only pays off for big deals and/or extremely important clients.
There are two schemes here. The first is to follow an email with a call. Personally, it drives me mad:
“I sent it to your email. Please take a look.”
Buddy, why would I have email if I didn’t read it?
By the way, notice which word I used: read, not look…
The second is to follow a call with an email. That’s not so bad. Once we’ve called and talked, it’s fitting to remind the other person of ourselves, our contacts and our offers in a follow-up ping email. If I’m not mistaken, Ferrazzi has something like this in Never Eat Alone.
I, for one, can completely forget a conversation if it barged into my work in the middle of a fairly “deep” state of focus.