Are You Willing to Pay the Price to Connect with Prospects?
As sellers we work hard to find and connect with viable prospects. Most of us are in constant prospecting mode.
Not only are we using our connections, the phone, and the mail service to find and meet prospects, the vast majority of us are investing heavily in the Internet as a prospecting tool. We invest time, energy and money in developing a blog and/or website and then promoting those tools, seeking to use them to generate interest on the part of potential clients.
We encourage those who visit our blog or website to investigate our offerings, to utilize the tools and resources we offer, and to by all means get in touch with us through email or by giving us a call.
It takes a great deal of thought, energy, and creativity—and, yes, money—to get a prospect to our site. It takes even more to get them to take the time and energy to reach out to us. Getting them to subscribe to our newsletter if we have one is a big step. But the ultimate victory is to get them to take that next really big step and to try to really engage us by asking a specific question or requesting specific information.
Every one of us has a “Contact Us” page. It’s the page we’re really hoping to get our visitors to. Everything else on the site it there for the purpose of getting visitors to click on that “Contact Us” page and to send us a communication.
And that’s where a large percentage of us blow it. That’s where we discourage visitors from connecting with us. That’s where we show that we’re more interested in our comfort and ease of use than our visitors.
What do we do that’s so crass? That’s so blatantly anti-visitor?
We make it hard for the visitor to contact us because we don’t want to run the risk of getting SPAM. Instead of making it so simple to connect with us that all the visitor has to do is click on an email link and start writing, we make them fill out line after line on a contact form. Instead of giving them a nice neat email address to click we make them type the address in their address bar because we’ve gotten cute and listed our address as salesperson (at) myaddress.com or some such nonsense, simply because we don’t want the inconvenience of having to manage our email. There are even sellers who’ll list their email address then put some type of spam arrest filter on their email, making their visitor not only send the email but then confirm they sent it once they get the spam arrest email.
Our message to our visitor is “connecting with you isn’t as important to me as not being bothered by email spam, so feel free to contact me, just don’t expect me to inconvenience myself to connect with you.”
Are we nuts or what? Do we want to connect with potential clients? Have we totally lost the concept of making it easy for the prospect to do business with us? Is our convenience really more important than connecting with a prospect?
How about you? Do you make it easy for your visitors or are you more concerned about your own comfort and convenience?
