Is Your Business Making These Dreadful Mistakes When Customers Contact You?

Is your business losing sales because you or your employees are presenting your business in a lazy and unprofessional manner when customers and prospects contact you?

Green Bay, WI (PRWEB) September 1, 2005

The phone rang at 8:27 am at M&J Manufacturing. Mike was having a coffee break and decided not to answer it. Even though sales were awful that month, Mike thought to himself, "If it is important the person will leave a message." Little did Mike know that the person calling his company was the purchasing agent of a Fortune 500 company. Little did Mike know that if he would have answered that call he would have made the largest sale of his life. But Mike did not answer the phone and the purchasing agent did not leave a message. Instead, the purchasing agent called a competitor of M&J Manufacturing and gave them the sale.

How many times has this unfortunate scenario happened to your business? Is your business losing sales because you or your employees are presenting your business in a lazy and unprofessional manner when customers and prospects contact you?

Ask yourself, "If I were a customer contacting my business, what would I think of this business? Would I think this is a friendly and professional business with great service or would I think it was unprofessional and a bit of a joke?"

Peter Geisheker, CEO of The Geisheker Group, Inc., states, "From my experience of helping businesses improve their sales and marketing programs, many businesses are presenting themselves in a very unprofessional manner and they are losing sales because of it."

Peter Geisheker offers the following guidelines to businesses:

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 Mary." Instead, say, "Hello, this is Mary with XYZ Corp. How may I help you today?"

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? If you are not answering your phone, you are losing sales.

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! Call your phone company immediately 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 to your local copy shop (or not to send it at all) because you don’t have a fax machine.

6. If you have a website, use your website’s 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 looks 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.

For more tips on how to successfully market your business, please download Peter Geisheker’s free marketing guide, "How to Write a Guerrilla Marketing Plan and 100+ Marketing Strategies" available at http://www.geisheker.com/books.htm.

About The Geisheker Group, Inc. (http://www.geisheker.com)

Established in 2004, The Geisheker Group is a marketing firm that specializes in helping businesses increase the effectiveness of their sales and marketing programs. The Geisheker Group offers a 100% money back guarantee: If our client is not absolutely thrilled with our services, we’ll give them a complete refund. The Geisheker Group can be reached by calling (920) 884-9041.

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