On a call with a customer your job is modest: clear away whatever stops them booking a date. Everything else waits for the meeting. That includes the explanation of what you offer, the haggling over price, and whatever you would like the customer to remember.
This chapter deals with three things that tend to leak into the call: persuading, price, and what gets said. For each one the source gives a clear instruction, and each instruction has a reason.
The job is clearing obstacles
The management source behind the booklet describes the post itself in plain terms. The person responsible for sign-ups does not hold long sales conversations or write sales letters. Their work is to help people sign up and to resolve whatever makes signing up difficult. Selling is no part of it.
A positive instruction comes with that: be “brief, efficient and effective.”
In small-business terms, you have no need to persuade anyone over the phone. You need to find what stands between the customer and the date, and remove it.
This fits what the booklet says about the phone from its first chapter. It is good at booking meetings and poor at sales conversations, and someone who persuades on the phone is doing the one job it does worst.
The obstacle itself is usually small, such as not knowing how long the meeting will take, or not being sure it is relevant.
Picture a customer who hesitates because she thinks the meeting will last two hours. When she hears it is twenty minutes, the hesitation ends. Or a customer who is unsure whether he has come to the right place. One question shows him he has, and a date is set.
The opposite is the same customer receiving a three-minute monologue about everything the business offers. He thanks you politely and says he will come back.
Price: do not lead there, and answer when asked
Here the source gives a balanced instruction that heads off two opposite mistakes. Whoever handles the enquiries does not concern themselves with prices. Even so, they may send a price list, and they may answer when someone asks them directly.
Both halves count equally. You do not steer the call toward price, and you do answer when the customer asks you straight. Refusing to answer a direct question about price sounds evasive, and the customer drifts away for a reason that has nothing to do with the price itself.
So the practical solution is a short, truthful answer, and straight back to the date. The price gets stated without becoming the subject of the call. The exact figure waits for the meeting, because only there will you know what the customer needs and be able to say what it costs.
The two mistakes look very different. Someone who tells a customer that prices are never discussed on the phone signals that there is something to hide. Someone who throws out an exact figure with no qualification, to a person who does not yet know what they need, turns that number into an anchor, and the whole conversation becomes an argument about it.
Both come from the same place. Price becomes the subject of the call, once as a secret and once as an argument, and the date gets pushed aside.
The phone has no memory
The third instruction looks technical, yet it carries real weight. The source states that the phone is memoryless, and from that comes an order to “keep very close notes of any phone call”.
When you work alone, the reader of those notes is you, a fortnight on. A call that was never written down is gone, and with it what you promised, what the customer told you, and the time you said you would call back.
The source adds a remark that hits home: it ranks even telexes, cables and airmail letters above the phone. In today's terms, whatever has to survive goes out in writing.
Picture an owner who writes a few short lines after every call instead of trusting memory.
Or a fitter who sends a short message after each call with the date, the time and the address. His cancellations fall, because no misunderstanding about the time is left. The message does what the phone cannot, and the customer can return to it at any moment to see when and where you meet.
That way each channel does what it is good at. The date is settled by phone and recorded in writing.
The booklet gives this chapter two exercises, one to build and one to do, plus self-check questions. From there it moves on to the harder situation, when the customer demands a price now.
On your next call, look for what stands between the customer and the date, and clear only that.