Is your company losing clients you should win before you even speak to them?

If you’re a new business or running your own business alone, it’s important not to miss out on new business when you’re in meetings or with clients. If you don’t have a secretary or receptionist to take calls, talk to customers and build up relationships with new leads, you’re losing business.

A marketing plan is designed to win customers and grow your business. Missing out on customers when they call is equivalent to a horse falling at the first fence of the Grand National. Even if a potential customer leaves you a message and requests a callback, the chances are that they will have found you online and called the next entry on Google, offering their business to a competitor before you have the chance to call back.

Is there a cost effective marketing solution?

A cost effective marketing solution is to find a suitable call answering service. This means that when you’re in a business meeting, with clients or you’re unable to answer your phone, calls are diverted to a manned call answering service. The services range from simple message taking through to diary management and a dedicated team that know what your company does and can develop sales leads on your behalf.

Call answering services are cost effective. You should expect to pay around the £40 per month mark for a good UK based call answering and management service that offers diary management and lead qualifying. The service is ideal for independent service providers such as life coaches, private psychiatrists, hypnotherapists, chiropractors and mobile beauty therapists. The monthly cost is often less than they receive for a single consultation.

A life coach in Hertfordshire might work 30 hours per week, or 120 hours per month, that’s 120 hours where their phone is not answered if a new client calls! If they charge £40 per hour and see a client once a month and miss a call from a potential new client per month, that’s a loss of £480 per client per year just because they didn’t have someone to answer the call whilst seeing another client.

Do call answering services improve your marketing process?

I would recommend using a company that offers call handlers in the same country as your business. There is a lot of negativity about internationally outsourced call centres, it is one of the main areas of negative feedback for banks and online companies. If you run a local business, finding a company where accents are also local is a plus. So a Bristol based company would benefit from a Bristol accent on the end of the phone.

Companies such as Zebra Connections offers a broad range of telephone answering services, with call handlers getting to know businesses they answer calls from so that they can qualify new business leads, build a personal rapport and pass on information that they gauge from callers ranging from the best time to call back, the specific service they’re interested in and any additional buying signals that they might offer. This increases the chances that they will await your call before contacting other companies and gives you the chance to prepare to make a sale and win them as a new client.

Check out how Zerba Connections help companies avoid missing out on new business here and how they improve your marketing effectiveness.