The Sales Process begins at “Hello”

Who answers the phone when someone calls your business? Do you have an automated attendant or do you have a “live” person handing calls? If yours is like most businesses these days, you probably use an  automated attendant. An auto attendant can certainly save money on payroll, but do you know how it’s affecting your bottom line?

I have always paid a lot of attention to how my service clients’ incoming calls are handled. After all, if I have set up an advertising campaign for them I want to be sure that every lead that is generated from that campaign are accounted for. I’m lucky because I when I set up Pay Per Click campaigns, I include with a free service that enables my clients to see what incoming leads are generated and listen to a recording of each call.

Recently, I performed a very unscientific experiment to see I could discern a connection between how incoming calls are handled and overall conversions. I discovered that auto attendants get significantly more hang-ups than when a live person picks up the phone. In addition, I discovered that most auto attendant systems seem to have at least one, if not all, of the following issues:

• Too many rings before extension pick up (the most hang-ups here)
• Long delays connecting to extensions (leads to customer frustration)
• Confusing employee directories (totally frustrating)
• Outdated information in the recording (such as services provided)
• The sales department is the last option in the extension list (should be the first!)

Try phoning your own company as if you are a first time caller. What’s your experience? If it’s less than stellar, do something about it fast. Now’s not the time to let any incoming leads go.

Remember, the sales process begins at “Hello” and it’s the first step in to getting to “Yes!”

Tags: Incoming Leads, pay per click, Sales

Posted in Local Business, Paid Search, Sales | 2 Comments »

October 6th, 2009

The Power of “Being There”

The beauty of paid search is that it can be adjusted so fast and so easily that I can help my clients respond to whatever is happening in their business. Here is an example of why it is so important to “Be There” when people are looking for your business’s services on the web.

I received an email from one of my clients two weeks ago asking to shut off his paid search campaign for a while. He said that  his company was looking to cut-back on some of their expenses and felt that they had more business than they could handle for the time being. (A classic example of my having done my job too well!) After some discussion, we agreed that it wasn’t a good idea to shut his program off completely, so we lowered the budget by 1/2 and eliminated some business categories.

Yesterday, I received an email from him with the subject line: “Help!”. Turns out that his call volume has gone down significantly. We agreed to move the budget back up to the original level and re-launch in the ad groups we had eliminated.

My client has discovered that “Being There” is important, even when business is booming. His intelligently run and managed paid search program enables me to keep him there and keeps his phone ringing.

Tags: Paid Search, pay per click, search engine marketing, SEM

Posted in Paid Search | No Comments »

November 18th, 2008