Lead Generation Tip of the Week – When Not to Communicate

I ran a lead generation training course recently and had various sales people, sales managers, marketing managers and telemarketers on the course.  We got on to the subject of when you shouldn’t contact people, and according to different “studies” you shouldn’t contact people on:

Monday morning
Friday afternoon
Any time before 10 am
Any time after 4 pm
Over lunch
Wednesday afternoons
School holidays
The day after a bank holiday

From looking at this after the training I realised that there were only about 10 hours a week when people think they should contact prospects.  To me this is just crazy and these are only excuses to put off contacting prospects.  I turned the training around and looked for reasons for contacting prospects;

Their supplier has let them down
They have a new account manager at your competitor that they don’t get on with
Their boss has just made it a priority
They are reviewing suppliers
They are trying to cut costs
They are trying to improve their service
Their supplier has become complacent
They don’t have a good relationship with their supplier

What you’re trying to do is contact the decision maker when any one of these things has happened. 

And these can happen any time of the day any day of the week.  They can even happen the day after they have told you they are not interested.

This is where your regular communication and high quality content come in. If your target market like and value the information you send then you can keep in touch with them on a regular basis.

We have a rule here, we accept we cannot win the business every time but what we don’t accept is not being involved in the bid in the first place.  There is no excuse for this; if we have good data and communicate good information regularly we will be considered.

That is exactly what you have to do, stop finding excuses for not contacting people and start finding the reasons to do so.