Marketing Communication and Small Business

"Are you making these business communication mistakes
when prospects and customers contact you?"

by Peter Geisheker, CEO, The Geisheker Group, Inc., (920) 592-9595

I ask you to go through this exercise because from my experience of working with clients on improving their sales and marketing programs, many businesses are presenting themselves in a very unprofessional manner and they are losing sales because of it.

Here are some guidelines for providing your customers and sales prospects with a professional experience when they contact you:

1. Answer your phone in a friendly and professional manner and say the name of your company. Don’t answer your phone by saying, “This is Mike.” Instead, say, “Hello, this is Mike with XYZ Corp. How may I help you today?”

2. 2. Do everything possible to make sure your phone is answered by a live person. In today’s fast-paced world, people want instant gratification. If a prospect is ready to buy and calls your business and nobody answers the phone, your prospect will probably go to your competition and buy from them. How many times have you gone through the phone book to purchase a product or service and kept calling different companies until you got a live person on the phone? I do it all the time.

3. If you are unable to answer your telephone, you better have voice mail. Nothing is more unprofessional and irritating than calling a business and the phone just rings and rings and there is no voice mail. If you do not have voice mail, shame on you! Immediately stop reading this marketing article and call your phone company and get voice mail.

4. Check your voice mail often and return phone calls quickly. If you want to make more sales, do everything you can to return phone calls quickly. And by quickly I mean in under 2-hours. If you wait a day or two to return a prospect’s call, you have probably lost that sale and the only one to blame is YOU.

5. Have a fax machine. It makes your business look very unprofessional when a customer wants to send you a fax and you have to tell them to send it over to your local Kinko’s store (or not to send it at all) because you don’t have a fax machine.

6. If you have a business website, use your website domain name for all employee email addresses. Businesses that are using hotmail, yahoo or aol email addresses look unprofessional. If you do not have a website and you are forced to use a yahoo, hotmail or aol email address, at least use something that sounds professional. Using “hotgirl28” at email.com is horribly unprofessional. You may laugh and say nobody would do that but I see it all the time.

If you need help creating a marketing program to determine the precise strategies you should be using to market your company, or you need help developing marketing materials such as a brochure, a press release, sales copy for your website, a display ad, or a sales letter for a direct mail piece, please call 920-592-9595. We would love to help you improve your marketing.

To view all of the different marketing services we provide, please visit
http://www.marketing-consulting-company.com.

To Your Success!

Peter Geisheker
President and CEO
The Geisheker Group, Inc.
"Innovative Marketing for Innovative Companies"
http://www.marketing-consulting-company.com
(920) 592-9595

You may reprint this article for free as long as you include a link to
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