Whether a call with a customer ends in a booked meeting is mostly settled before you dial. If you know what you want from the call and who you are ringing, you finish quickly with a date in the diary. If you dial without both, you end up in a long call that goes nowhere.
That sounds like advice about being tidy. In practice the preparation is worth more than anything you say once the customer picks up. You can improve your results without changing a word of your wording, simply by knowing what you are after.
A full formula in two lines
The rule comes from an unlikely place: a policy letter whose entire subject is cost control. In two lines it gives the whole formula for a call. It begins with the instruction to “work out what you want to say or ask” before you ring. Then it jumps straight to the end. Once you have said what you planned, or got the figure you were after, the call is finished and you hang up.
The formula has three parts: plan, say, hang up. Every one of them is a limit. There is no room in it for a second topic you remember halfway through, and none for ringing a customer just to hear how things are going.
Picture a studio owner who began writing one line on a card before every call, stating what she wanted out of it. She changed nothing in the way she talks to customers, and her booking rate went up.
The opposite is the same owner earlier, when she rang customers to ask how things were going. Within a quarter of an hour she would find herself giving advice away.
Hanging up is the hard part
Of the three parts, the third is the hardest. Most people know how to plan, and they know how to say what they planned. Far fewer know how to end the call the moment they have what they came for.
Someone who does not hang up keeps talking, and a call that runs on after its purpose is met slowly turns into an attempt to sell. That is why a call also has a length. The same letter says calls should be very short.
It sounds like little until you try it. A call whose whole purpose is one date needs no more than that. Anyone who needs a long call to book a meeting is really trying to sell by phone, and the booklet has already explained why the phone is poor at it.
When the other person goes to look something up
Beside the length sits a rule that looks small. When the person at the other end goes off to find something, do not hold the line and wait. Say you will call them back at a time you name, and end the call. Then call, collect what was missing, and end the call again.
Picture a fitter who stopped waiting on the line and began saying he would ring again at a set hour. That change alone saved him an hour a day.
Or a consultant who measured how long her calls ran. Within a month her average had fallen to under half of what it was.
The second preparation is about the person
The second preparation concerns who you are ringing, more than the call itself. The source words this rule for business: gather the facts before you set out to see the customer. The source adds that even a drive past the works teaches you a good deal.
It also says what that buys you. Once you can quote facts about the company and where it stands, the customer will be “flattered, and will see that they are dealing with a professional”.
The best example in the material is a person running one business on their own. They did not wait for answers from head office. They rang round to find out exactly who the right person was at each site and what that person's job was, then rang that person directly. Those calls led to demonstration meetings.
Picture an owner who reads the customer's About page before dialling. It takes two minutes and gives him one sentence nobody can fake.
The opposite is someone who rings and asks the customer what their business does. The question announces that they have not checked, and the call starts in debt.
The two preparations answer two different questions. The first settles what you want from the call. The second settles who you are talking to. Without the first the call has no end, and without the second it has no good start.
The booklet gives this chapter two exercises, one to do and one to prepare, plus self-check questions. From there it moves on to the call itself, line by line.
Before your next call, two minutes of preparation will decide more than anything you say in it.