Communicating Effectively with your Customers and Prospects – Part Two

How you communicate with your prospects and customers, as noted in the previous post, has a direct impact on the growth of your organization. You may have a great development team or run the best marketing campaigns but if you can’t effectively communicate with your prospects or customers, it will all come to naught. In this post, we’ll continue the discussion about effective communication.

Seeking feedback: No one is perfect. We understand that. Same is the case with communication. We don’t expect everyone to get going from day one and be flawless communicators as soon as they start. However, we expect our employees to get better with time as they come to understand more and more about the company and the market. An important aspect of this is seeking feedback from people you’ve communicated with. After all, if you did your targeting and segmenting right, most of your prospects come under the same or similar demographic. What works with one prospect might work with another as they both are very likely have the same concerns and questions about the product or service. So, to be able to serve them better in future, you could institute a program of seeking feedback about your communication from prospects you’ve been in touch with. You will learn about what you did right and where you went wrong.

Preparation: One of the biggest mistakes that employees having customer-facing roles make is to not prepare adequately. Before you make a call to prospects, try to anticipate what their needs are likely to be and what questions they are likely to ask. Frame you answers so that you don’t have to falter when you are having a conversation with them. No salesperson can be happy with a long sales cycle. But if you have to end conversations because you don’t know the answer and say instead, “I’ll get back to you on that,” it is you who is prolonging the cycle.

We’ll see more in the next installment.