Are you being explicit enough with your clients?

When you want to make an offer to your client, it feels easier to make a soft approach. You don’t want to scare them off so you decide to outline what your services or your products are and finish off with a “If you are interested, why don’t you get in touch?”

After all, you don’t want to come across like a double-glazing salesman, do you?

But unfortunately, not being specific enough about how someone can get in touch with you, can actually be one of the reasons why somebody doesn’t get in touch.

Are you asking them to e-mail you? Are you asking them to pick up the phone? Are you asking them to put their name and e-mail address into an opt-in form?

And when are expecting a response from them? Today, tomorrow, before next Friday?

The more explicit you are with your call to action – the reason why a potential client should be in touch right there and then – the easier it is for your client to know what to do.

So forget about being softly, softly. Forget about trying to let them make the choice; give them the choices available. Be explicit with your telephone number: call me now on 01… or E-mail me at …

Make it easy for your clients to know what the next stage is and how they should be communicating with you, and the more likely they are to take the next step towards spending money with you and order your products or services.

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Tags: Marketing, selling

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 9:07 am and is filed under Marketing Design & Copy, Marketing Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Are you being explicit enough with your clients?”

David Winch says:

July 17, 2009 at 10:45 am

Great article Karen. Especially the ‘options’ point which makes the customer’s choice ‘Which?’ and not ‘If?’

Calling a spade an excavating implement never helped anyone!

David

[Reply]
Andy Preston says:

July 17, 2009 at 10:54 am

Karen, great article!

The fear of being seen as ‘too pushy’ stops many small business owners and people that would consider themselves ‘non-salespeople’ winning as much business as they deserve.

That happens in their face-to-face interactions, their telephone interactions and as you mention above, even in their advertising and website and on-line interactions!

I wrote an article for a design magazine here – http://www.andy-preston.com/2009/01/selling-in-a-creative-industry/ (warning – they asked for it to be provocative on purpose to disturb their readers out of their comfort zones), but it also applies to many small business people.

Keep up the good work!

[Reply]