Home Office Telephony

Get More Clients Using Your Telephone

When someone talks to you about using the telephone for marketing your business what immediately comes to mind? Cold Calling. That dreaded age old practice of calling people who don't know you to try to sell them your products and services.

I don't know about you but I HATE cold calling and would rather poke myself in the eye than to call a bunch of numbers from a list and go through the humiliation of uncomfortable silences, rude brush offs and sudden hang ups.

Luckily there are many other ways of using your phone to promote yourself and your business. Here are a few that you could implement today with the help of a Virtual PBX:

• Fax on demand – Set up an extension in your system that people can dial to request information about your company and available services. This could be a brochure, a white paper, a list of your services or even an order form. The callers will hear a recording that will instruct them to enter their fax number and the system will automatically fax the requested document to them.
• Information Line – Offer recorded information to callers 24/7. Use this extension for promotions, property listing information, information about your business process and your services and give them your web address. Any information that you would typically provide a prospect to warm them up to you when you speak to them they will be able to hear at any time of day or night.
• Questionnaire Extension (Q&A) – Prequalify your prospects by having them answer a series of questions. Their answers to these questions will be sent to you as one voicemail recording. Let's say you are a Realtor and you have advertised your toll free number. When a prospect sees your ad and call yours number they can be greeted with: "Thank you for calling Joe Realtor. Please answer the following questions so I may better serve you. Press # after each answer. What is your name and telephone number? Are you a buyer or a seller? If you are calling about a listing, what is the address of the property? If you are a buyer, do you have a bank's pre-approval letter?" Etc. This system works great for businesses that get lots of leads and want to separate the hot prospects from the tire kickers.
• Click to Call From Website – Convert those website browsers into paying clients. Add a button to your website that will allow prospects connect to you instantly and for free. When the prospect clicks on the button they will get a dialog box in their computer where they can type in their number. Then the system calls them and connects them to you. The easier you make it for prospects to contact you the higher the probability they will do business with you.
• Track response rates for your ads – Set up an extension for each of your marketing vehicles – yellow pages, classified ad, publications, Google Adwords etc. When you print your contact number include the appropriate extension number. The system will tell you how many calls you received for each, where callers are located and you can export those contacts into your favorite CRM for follow up.

See? There are plenty of ways to make contact with your prospects that don't require cold calling. Thank Heavens!

Is Your Phone Image Consistent With Your Branding?

Most entrepreneurs and small business owners today know the importance of developing a brand for their business. Countless books have been written about the topic. Marketing gurus talk about it incessantly. They tell us to invest in a "corporate identity", get a memorable logo, a professional business card and a sharp looking website. But they seem stop there. To me something very important is being overlooked.

Does your sound match your branding? Once someone sees your website and is impressed enough to call your number - and hopefully hire you - will they hear something as professional and polished as the rest of your business image?

If I call your number right now would I be inspired to hire you or to hang up as quickly as possible? If it's the latter, take a look at some of the technologies we discuss in this blog and make use of them.

Here are some things you can do to spruce up your "phone image":

1. If you use an auto-attendant make sure the recording is of an actual human being – preferably you. However, if you don't care for your own voice, have a friend record the message for you or hire a professional to do it. Companies like Holdcom or Amazing Voice will do the recording for you. Whatever you do don't leave the computer generated prompts no matter how smooth it sounds. Nothing says generic like a robotic voice in your ear.
2. Offer lots of information – a description of your services, information about your business process, your business hours. Have enough information to build trust with your caller but not so much that it would require 4 menus and 15 sub-menus to deliver it. No one will sit through 25 prompts.
3. Always give callers the option to go straight to voicemail and bypass additional prompts. This will be especially appreciated by people who call you frequently. 

What about you? Have you thought about how your brand sounds lately?

When Disaster Strikes

As I write this, tropical storm Noel is hanging out in the Bahamas. Although it is swirling quite a ways from where I live (just south of Vero Beach) we have been seeing a lot of rain with wind gusts of 20 to 30 miles an hour. I'm used to this. I go through it every year around this time. Except for a few years when I traveled, I've lived half of my life in Puerto Rico and the other half in Florida – both smack in the middle of "Hurricane Alley". Now that I'm a business owner I not only have to worry about my personal home and possessions but also my business operations and assets.

Wherever you happen to live, no one is safe from business crippling disasters; earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, ice storms and on and on. Most independent service professionals are smart enough to have a disaster recovery plan of sorts. You may have an online data backup service like Mozy or a portable hard drive but have you given any thought to your phone system? How will you stay in touch with clients and prospects if your home office is destroyed or your phone and internet services go down for an extended period of time?

Here's a checklist of things to consider:

• Do you have the ability to forward you main business line to a cell phone; yours or an employee or colleague?
• Can you retrieve your voicemails by calling your system? If you only have answering machine you may lose important messages if it's destroyed.
• Will you be able to continue to receive important faxes? Or are you solely dependent on your fax machine?
• If the disaster has taken out both your home office business line and your cell phone line (this has happened to me more than once) are you able to record a message on your system letting clients know your situation and giving them alternative options to speaking to you – such as calling a colleague or leaving you a message that you can listen to when you are able. Right before hurricane Wilma in 2005 - which was projected to (and did) move right over my area - I recorded an outgoing message on my system telling callers I would be unavailable and that I would get back to them as soon as possible. In the meantime they could call a colleague of mine who was not in the path of the storm.

This is one of the main reasons I recommend virtual pbx services. They allow you to get back to business much more quickly than land lines or even VOIP services.

Noel is a mild storm compared to others I've lived through and it is not forecasted to come my way. Even if it does, I'm ready. Is you business ready for a disaster?

Your Phone is Ringing…. Now What? Handling Business Calls on a Shoestring Budget

When I first started my journey as a self-employed professional (Ok… when I was forced into self-employment by a company layoff) one of the biggest questions I had was: "How will I handle my business calls when I work from home?" It didn't matter that I made my living in the telecommunications field for the previous 10 years, this question still dumbfounded me. Since I had little monetary resources (read: I was broke) I wondered if I could get away with just using my home phone line or even my cell phone.

What to do?.... What to do?.... If you are just starting out and the state of your bank account leaves much to be desired, here are some things to consider:

• Using your Cell Phone for all your business calls:

  Pros: Typically, you will be the only one answering your cell phone so there is little danger of your partner or one of your children picking up the phone and potentially turning off your prospects. A cell phone, being highly portable, will allow you to always be available when money calls (as I like to say).

  Cons: Depending on what kind of service plan you have, receiving all your business calls on your cell phone could get expensive since you are typically charged by the minute. Mobiles can be unpredictable as far as voice quality (good reception) and call connection (dropped calls). The last thing you want as you are trying to close that profitable deal is a bunch of static on the line or for the call to drop at that crucial "Yes, I will buy from you" moment.

• Purchasing a "Distinctive Ring" service from your phone company:

  Distinctive Ring (as is known by most companies) is an add-on service for your home phone that you can order from local phone company. It allows you to have an additional telephone number – which you can promote as your business number – that has a different ring tone than your regular phone number. 

  Pros: It lets you know that the incoming call is for your business before you pick up the phone and tells everyone else in your family to keep their hands off. No additional equipment is required and it costs between $5.00 and $10.00 USD a month.

  Cons: If the line is being used by a member of your family (for example your chatty teenager) the call may be lost. If you have Call Waiting your teenager may hear the tone indicating there's a call waiting but decide not to switch over (that story about the football player having a crush on her is just too good to interrupt) and if you don't have Call Waiting the caller would hear a busy signal.

• Purchasing Voicemail with multiple boxes:

  Some local service phone companies sell a voicemail system for your home that will have multiple extensions. If you choose, you could tell all the members of your family that no one is to touch the phone when it is ringing and to let all calls go to voicemail. That way the caller will hear a message such as this: "Thank you for Calling. To speak with Victoria Santiago from Clarity Transactions press 1. To speak with Kenneth press 2. To speak with Ryan press 3." After the caller chooses the right number they can leave a message for that person.

  Pros: Inexpensive solution. You can get a voicemail system that handles multiple boxes for about $5.00 and $7.00 USD a month. Every member of your family manages their own mailbox which gives each their privacy. You don't have to listen to your partner's messages while retrieving your own. And it's definitely a better option than having one voicemail message saying "You've reached the Smith family. Please leave a message". Your prospect is not calling your family he is calling your business.

  Cons: This option will only work if all calls are answered by the voicemail system. If you have teenagers at home… good luck with that. Having this type of set up is also not as professional as you might want. The fact that you work from is basically advertised on your message and some prospects may not be comfortable with that and hang up. It is much better if the prospects learn that you have a home office AFTER you've been able to fully impress them withal the wonderful things you can do for them.

The list above is my favorite least expensive tactics to start handling your business calls. Feel free to share your own.

I should mention that, in my opinion, none of the strategies above portray the best "phone impression" of you and your business. I bit the bullet from the beginning and purchased a virtual phone system with an automated attendant and it is the solution I recommend to most independent professionals. Stay tuned for future posts on this subject.