Whenever I speak to clients about lead generation, a common topic of discussion is when not to communicate. There are many claims about the best times to communicate with 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 afternoon
- School holidays
- The day after a bank holiday
This leaves 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 then talk about reasons to communicate with prospects, including:
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
Their supplier has become complacent
They are trying to improve their service
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 happen – which can be any time of the day, any day of the week. They can even happen the day after they’ve told you they’re 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, you can contact 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’s no excuse for this; if we have good data and communicate 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.
