Email vs. Phone vs. In-Person Meeting? Four Viewpoints
To what extent can emails be used in place of phone calls and face-to-face meetings when maintaining and developing relationships with clients and other important network contacts?
This question is asked by someone in every group of aspiring rainmakers I work with. Sometimes the speaker asks hopefully, wishing to avoid phone calls. At others the speaker is trying to sort out mixed messages he is getting from different clients. Or she may be wrestling with the perennial juggling of client work with business development and may see emails as a partial solution.
One way or another it is a question that every professional seeking to become a rainmaker must answer.
Nor is it as trivial a question as it might at first appear. How you answer it affects the effectiveness and cost of your efforts to develop business. Because the answer will vary from one network contact to another and even with the same contact over time, it is a question you must answer several times a day . . .for the rest of your career. There is good reason, then, for asking the question.
Four bloggers have all agreed to post their answers to the email question simultaneously, each offering a different perspective, with all responses linked. They are:
• Brian Carroll, author and expert in lead generation on the complex sale. His post can be found at blog.startwithalead.com/
• Tom Kane, expert in marketing and selling legal services. His post can be found at www.legalmarketingblog.com/
• Mark Buckshon, prodigious blogger and expert on the sale of design and construction services. His post can be found at www.constructionmarketingideas.blogspot.com/
• And me. My post “Email, Call or Go See?” follows:
Email, Call or Go See?
What’s more effective, emails, phone calls or in-person meetings? Each time you contact a client or other member of your network, you are, in effect, assessing the desirability of these alternative forms of communication in terms of practical consideration, your objectives, and your and your contact’s preferences. Usually, this is a split-second decision. At other times, it requires consideration. Here are some guidelines to check you decisions against:
General Guidelines
1. You need to use a mix of communications channels with each person in your network. This means that if you have communicated largely by email over the past year, it’s probably time to get face to face or to talk by phone with her again.
2. A client’s preference for one channel over another should weigh heavily in your choice, but it is not the only consideration. Your needs count, too. For example, if you have largely respected the client’s preference for email over the past year, it may now be time to get face-to-face to warm up the relationship.
3. Telephone calls are the great compromise between the other two channels to your contacts. They provide most of the information obtained face to face, allow give and take and the shifting of subjects to redirect the conversation to subjects that are productive for all parties. But they cost a fraction of what a meeting does in time and money. You need to make lots of phone calls.
Face-to-face meetings are best when:
1. You want to establish relationships. Good relationships are based on trust. Trust travels better through the medium of broken bread than it does through the Ethernet.
2. You want to advance relationships. Relationships are based on frequency of contact, shared values and shared experiences. The last of these is provided most effectively face to face. A mechanical engineer participated in charities that large real estate owners and managers participated in, too. Working with them on these worthy causes greatly strengthened his relationship with them.
3. You want the contact to remember your involvement in a matter. If you introduce two people who are likely to receive high value from knowing each other, it would be wise to host the lunch when they first meet. Otherwise, they are likely to forget your involvement.
4. A client clearly intends to hire you to address a matter, but is always too busy to get around to it. Get in front of him, and, chances are, he will take advantage of the moment to get things started.
5. You can take advantage of trips and association meetings to reduce their cost. Meeting with people is time consuming and expensive, often prohibitively so, if the client is at a distance. If you have a meeting with one person at a client company, use the visit as an excuse to drop by to see other people you know in the building. Or take a late flight home so that you have a chance to meet with another contact in the same city. Use an association meeting to get face to face with dozens of people it would be impractical to go see.
6.You want to gather sensitive information. Phone calls are second best. Neither requires leaving a written record.
The telephone is best when:
1. It’s important to control the costs of maintaining a network and still get the benefit of give-and-take exchanges. A locally based contact from your A List might get three or four calls from you for every time you meet. One from you B List might get between six and eight calls for every meeting.
2. A lot of give-and-take is required. In such cases, phone calls and meetings are usually more efficient.
3. You want to make an indirect probe. If, for example, you want to ask if any progress has been made towards the approval of your proposal, but don’t want to disturb the client yet again for this purpose, you can call to give him information you have come across about a competitor or something else he would be interested in. Then at the end of the conversation, you can say, “By the way, as long as I have you on the phone, has any progress been . . . .”
Email is best when:
1. You want to remind clients of what you do and that you are thinking about them. One goal of frequent contact is to capture mindshare. Sending a client regular emails, as long as they have substance, is a way to that. As one rainmaker expressed it to me, regular mailings of articles and whitepapers demonstrating the firm’s intellectual capital are one way of saying, “PING! I’m still here. PING! I’m thinking about you. PING! This is what I do.” But avoid passing on what might be seen as spam.
2. You need to confirm meetings and to summarize their results. This is good professional practice and gets you two extra PINGs from the meeting.
3. Your message is long and complex. You can plan what you say more carefully and the reader can review your thoughts several times and contemplate on them.
4. When you want to create a record of a contact.
So, before you send an email, look deep into your heart and ask yourself if it is the right thing to do, or if your doing it because you are . . . , well, . . . chicken! And if you are agonizing over the choice between email and phone, get over it! Pick up the phone and dial!