In a post published in late October (Waiting for the Elections), Margaret Grisdela described a small law firm’s decision to put its marketing effort on hold until after the election. Grisdela, quite correctly, argues against this decision. The election is now over, leading me to wonder if the firm has moved ahead with its marketing or has found some other reason to delay. My money says they haven’t budged, and if they have, it is more because of Grisdela’s persuasiveness than their own inclination.

Some people always have a good reason not to market now. That especially applies to the most fundamental of business development activities, picking up the phone and calling. There are lots of good reasons not to call:

• He doesn’t like to be bothered
• She isn’t a decision maker
• He’s new to his job. Let’s let him get settled for a bit.
• They’re in bed with a competitor
• No one is likely to be buying in this economy
• I don’t have a compelling enough reason to call her
• Monday mornings aren’t a good time to call
• He’ll think I’m just trying to sell him something
• I’ve got other things to do
• The probability of any call resulting in a lead rounds to zero

The law firm that Grisdela mentioned can come up with good reasons for delaying year round:

• Let’s let the dust settle from the election for a couple of weeks
• People are too distracted by the approaching holidays to pay attention to our marketing efforts
• People are too busy closing their books for the year
• Let’s get the new administration in place,first

. . . and so on.

These are all good reasons, but there’s one reason for calling that trumps all of them: If you never talk to anyone, you’ll never sell anything.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 7:49 am and is filed under Business Development, Marketing, Phone Calls, Rain making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.