Being Businessey

Entertaining chat with a customer in the ‘report writing’ software space this morning.  Their main business development honcho was bemoaning how England was going down a useless voicemail culture route.  Apparently less people that lead sales teams are answering their phones in person lately, just like in America.

He went through the motions of leaving messages about how much more sales they could make, only to get a return call rate of (in his estimation) 1 in 50.  That’s 2%.

So recently he’s thought of changing tack, so we riffed a few ideas about together.  The conclusion was to go for something less obviously ‘salesy’.  He believes that such prospects are well used to ‘I can change your life’ pitches on voicemail.  So to distinguish yourself in the first instance, he’s now set off to try being more business-sounding.  “Ideas around selling more of slower moving lines” for example being one method of entry.