The Client Letter
April 30, 2013
The Northland
Rain and Fog 37 Degrees
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Email is efficient, but when it comes to the nitty gritty of selling your services, it’s simply not effective.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that when you’re selling professional services… email is a thief.
It steals from you.
It limits you.
It removes your ability to communicate 90% of what makes you YOU.
Worst of all, it puts at risk your ability to ever find out the truth about whether or not a client is right for you.
And yet, people continue to use it.
Take for instance the “So what do you charge?” question you get from prospects. I don’t know of a smart way to answer that question via email… unless you want to be viewed as a vendor. (It would take 5+ emails just to get the right information you need to answer that.)
We’ve been brainwashed into choosing efficiency over effectiveness.
And we’ve been trained to do just about anything we can in our power to avoid what we might consider direct confrontation.
Email has its place, of course. You’re reading an email right now, after all. 🙂 Email attracts the prospect.
But when it comes to “closing” a high-ticket project with a client, email just doesn’t do it in my book.
The telephone does.
I got good at using the telephone to sell after I moved away from the big city of Chicago out into nowheresville Indiana.
I had my family to talk to out there. But as for qualified prospects? Well, there weren’t any.
The next time you’re tempted to close the deal via email, resist and set up a phone appointment.
Use that opportunity to really understand what your prospect is trying to achieve. Ask the questions you need to identify the real problems and to understand how to create an effective solution.
I’ve created two tools that can make this job easier: