Message Latency Hack

A sibling to my post last month on post- (especially first) meeting doc lag times.

Not all emails are created equal.

When it comes to those from a prospect, even now thirty years on from experiencing my first such comms, there can be upheaval in a seller's day from receiving an unexpected such missive. When it has the whiff of a competitor trap, even more so. The tendency is to reply asap.

The fall-back was to ring. Perhaps counter-productive when the sender did not choose that medium in the first place.

Yet as exposed to all from 2020, an endless thread of clarifications can go on far too long. When say a snappy '8-minute' video call upfront would have been way more beneficial all-round.

Regardless of content to be delivered at any later stage, an instant reply allows you to be brief. Almost instant-message like. Even down to a single emoji 'reaction'. Yet the longer response is left, the higher the expectation of the original sender can rise. So if after 'a while', you respond with one-liner, the recipient is prone to sense a mismatch and judge you harsher. 'All that time and yet just a teeny response...'. The spectrum from feeling a touch slighted to utterly dismissed can hold many an emotion that is negatively down to you.

So a rule thumb emerged;

The quicker the reply, the shorter it can be. The longer you wait, the more detailed/thoughtful it needs to be to justify the delay.

Noting that people tend to more heavily weight any info instantly received from their sent email, a 'holding pattern' reply to say you're on it can help. Maybe even asking that one quick qu that on first glance occurs, stating you'll ask around colleagues first, or check when any meeting they might need reply by is. Provided your later fuller response is indeed that more substantive, thoughtful and richer reply they'd then expect.

In the main, despite other methods, email remains key for detail you need documented.

For a while in the Noughties, there was a trend to upload your spangly sales doc to a public folder on your server and send the link. Then able to track when it'd been accessed.

Strange how long such link often went unclicked.

With ubiquitous cloud, sharing docs and enhanced security, such ability would seem cleaner today, yet has pretty much disappeared.

When you're on top of your process, you'll know exactly which docs and the procedure around them set you apart. Particularly collaborative ones. For these it's not just their message, but their timing that give you the edge. Make sure you know it.