As a sales professional your mobile phone, despite all other technologies available is probably still your most valuable and widely used tool. Stats show that 92% of all customer interactions still happen over the phone and it’s important to talk rather than email or use social media to build rapport, get the deal and maintain a strong relationship with your customers.
Sometimes though your phone can be a hindrance as causes interruptions at just the wrong time. You may be in a meeting or focusing on a pitch or a proposal and the phone keeps ringing and you can easily lose focus on the task at hand as you’re reluctant to miss any call. It may be a colleague asking for help or it may be another customer, just as important as the prospect that you are working on.
If you take these calls you are stepping away from your current task, you end up dealing with the phone call as want to provide a great service or support, and then it takes you several minutes to take your mind back to the original task. Sometimes it would be far more efficient for you to ignore the call but that has its own effect – if you know that one of your most valuable customers has called and you’ve ignored them your concentration will still be affected and you’ll have a nagging feeling that you’ve missed something important. From their point of view, if they have to keep calling until you have completed your task then they will become frustrated.
What you need to do here is take control and start setting reasonable expectations with your colleagues and customers. Stop letting your phone rule you.
If I call somebody and I hear a message with a clear explanation of what they are doing and when they’ll next be available then I will be less inclined to become frustrated at their lack of availability. Even if it is a message that they have taken a couple of hours out of their working day to watch their son or daughter in a school play. If I know, I am completely clear on when I’ll next hear from them and know not to continue using up my time calling them back. We both then use our time more effectively and when we do speak to each other, we’ll both be focused and the call will be more productive as a result.
another number can help with our ‘over-availability’ as our Do not Disturb function allows you to set custom greetings for each occasion and whilst you are busy writing an in-depth proposal, or at a long customer meeting you can state that in your voicemail message, even giving a time when you’ll next be free to talk. You won’t even know that anybody has tried to reach you until you switch your work number back on!
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