Angela’s anecdotes reminded me of a former business partner who would resolve thorny problems by literally “sticking them in the back of his brain” and letting them resolve themselves. He almost always found that letting his unconscious, and intuition, work away at the solution in the background yielded much better results than trying to ‘consciously’ work it out.

Is there a way to download the interview as an mp3?

Thanks,

Alain

Getting telephone meetings often leads to setting up a direct relationship with a potential customer and I find Skype (an internet VoIP P2P type service) an excellent tool for this. I see that many business cards are now also carrying the persons Skype ID. But since the Client can see if you are on-line or not and you can see if they are on-line (unless you or they set it otherwise) then that can encourage impromptu calls that either of you may not be fully prepared for (I find). The danger might be that you do not prepare the call before hand for maximum impact and desired outcome since it is so easy to place the call from your PC directly to theirs. Do you have any advise as how one should handle these type of calls and build on the ongoing relationship? It seems to me that getting into a company, as hard as that is, is just the beginning and it would be easy to sabotage the relationship with a badly thought out subsequent call.

I see that for the first time Skype is down with a major outage and this will have an impact on the millions of businesses that now rely on it, perhaps they will even consider not using it and I wonder if it will prompt them to return to using the old fashioned PSTN and expensive mobile phones. Will this make people more self concious of making that call, more phobic perhaps? Also they may find themselves up against the determined PA blocker once again…what to do? Your methods may be even more in demand ! Making each call count is just as vital regardless of if it’s done with a normal phone call or a VoIP, MSN or Skype type call.

I am not a trader, but work in a telesales environment, where the stakes are relatively high (my market is the Pharmaceutical industry!). I read your request with interest and had some thoughts… (surprise, surprise..). I shall respond through my own experience which may or may not be relevent…

On leaving messages. This is very dangerous. The decision makers receive anywhere between 20 and 200 messages a day. Come end of day, the messages that they didn’t get to are binned, according to a VP a Pfizer. Furthermore, when leaving a message s/he will become irritated if you leave any more. Forget leaving messages, my friends! Roll your sleeves up, make a call list and hit the bricks/ make the calls… Sooner or later, you’ll get the decision maker on the other end of the phone and you can pitch him/ her to your heart’s content!

If you don’t like that particular brand of coffee, call their PA and a.) find out when they will be available b.) ask whether they can set aside 10 minutes on behalf of their boss so you can have a chat with them.

None of us are that important or that successful that we don’t need to make use of the basics…

Anyway, this is just what works for me; hope this helps…

Stuart

Do you have any tips how I can take my business further and employ some telemarketers to do some of th ework for me?