Sometimes there really aren’t enough hours in the day, especially when your inbox is full of unanswered messages, you’ve just received an emergency call out and the phone doesn’t stop ringing. You know that you should be out meeting your clients, but how on earth can you find the time to leave the office?
Relax! Let us deal with your phones, freeing you up to leave the office for those all-important customer meetings.
And to help you get the most out of these precious meetings, here is a short reminder as to why they are so important as well as a few tips to ensure they are successful:
1. Build trust – People buy people
95% of people say that face-to-face meetings are essential for long-term business, building trust and encouraging strong relationships.
2. Secure repeat business
Whether you arrange to meet Mike and let him win at golf again or you pop-in to see Debbie to congratulate her on her engagement, it shows that you appreciate them. This helps secure customer loyalty and generate repeat business.
3. Understand your customer
A huge part of communication is non-verbal using body language. Meeting clients face-to-face reveals so much more through facial expressions and hand gestures, helping you to interpret what they might really be thinking.
4. Increase productivity
Communicating by email is quick and you can send out lots of them, plus they have no tone and could be misread, perceived the wrong way or ignored. Meeting in-person secures your client’s attention for a set period of time and can certainly help reduce any potential misunderstandings. Ultimately, this saves you time and increases your productivity. The benefit of quality communication, over quantity…
5. Win more business
You are twice as likely to convert prospects into customers with an in-person meeting because you’ve started to build a relationship, identify concerns and discuss how you can address them… also, we all know it is very easy to say “no” if your only interaction has been over email.
We like to keep our customers happy, so here are our top tips to help ensure your meetings deliver happy customers too:
- Prepare for the meeting, know where you’re going and who you are meeting.
- Adopt a good posture, smile, be open and hold a good firm hand shake…but don’t physically crush their fingers.
- Enjoy a little small talk, ask about their hobby or family, mention a recent event, or simply ask how they are.
- Let them talk, no I mean it. You learn a lot about a client if you just listen and refrain from jumping in.
- Ask open and leading questions, be interested and show them that you care. They need to like you, remember you may be selling what you do, but they are buying you!
Keen to get out there and meet your customers but still worried that you may miss calls and lose out on business if you are away from your desk?
No need to fret, let the Verbatim team answer your phones for you. It’s what we do best! Speak to our team today, we’d love to meet you to discuss the perfect call-answering service for you.
