Moving Touches Closer Together

One of the ways that you can immediately increase the number of appointments you schedule is to speed up the pace of those communications, i.e. move them closer together.

Let’s say you are going to call a prospective client four times over the course of the year. One way to do that would be to make a call every ninety days, calling them quarterly. Some people follow this pattern, believing that if their dream client isn’t interested now, calling back in ninety days might allow them to catch that client at exactly the right moment. But from the client’s side, you called once and followed up with an email, and then you disappeared. There is no reason to take a call from a salesperson that calls once. That isn’t the kind of person you want to give your business to because they don’t really want it.

A better way to professionally and persistently pursue your dream client would be to remove the space between these four calls. Instead of spacing them ninety days apart, you put seven or so days in between them. You call, leave a voicemail, and send a follow-up email suggesting you’ll try again later. About a week later, you follow that same pattern, trying a third time at the end of that same week. Six or seven days later, you try again.

Calling every day makes you a stalker, and your prospect might believe you are belligerent. But calling around once a week for a few weeks in a row with a pitch that promises you’ll trade enough value for their time proves you are persistent and have something to offer. When your attempts are sporadic, you are sporadic, and so are your results. When you are disciplined and focused, you obtain your results faster and with greater certainty.

This is one of the areas where a lot of people fear the wrong danger. They worry about seeming persistent when they should worry about not being known at all. They also worry about being a nuisance, but what makes one a nuisance is not the frequency of the communication as much as it is the value of the communication. If you have something to share that is worth your dream client’s attention, move your touches closer together.