Ford Harding
by Ford Harding
To what extent should you use emails in place of phone calls and face-to-face meetings when developing and maintaining relationships with clients and other important network contacts?
This question is asked by someone in every group of aspiring rainmakers I work with. Sometimes the speaker asks hopefully, wishing to avoid phone calls. Others are trying to sort out mixed messages from clients. Or they may be wrestling with the perennial juggling of client work with business development and may see emails as a partial solution.
It’s not as trivial a question as it might at first appear. How you answer it directly impacts the effectiveness and cost of your efforts to develop business. Because the answer will vary for each contact and will change over time, it is a question you must answer several times a day…for the rest of your career.
So, which are more effective, emails, phone calls, or in-person meetings?
Actually, you need them all. You want to remain visible to every person in your network with different mixes of face-to-face, phone, and email contacts. Each of these communication channels offers advantages and disadvantages.
Face to Face
Putting aside practical constraints, in-person contact provides more information than the other two channels. Along with the contact’s words, you get that person’s inflection, speed, and intonation, all of which tell you something about the speaker. And, of course, you can see gestures and facial expressions.
A management consultant I worked with visited an old client, the CEO of a retail chain. The CEO looked so exhausted that the consultant offered to return another day. “No, please stay,” said the client. “I’m just worried about X.” The ensuing conversation about X resulted in a million-dollar project for the consultant’s firm over the next year. If he hadn’t seen the client, he might never have learned about the problem.
This example also shows how a face-to-face conversation can meander, allowing you to make on-the-spot decisions about what direction to go, based on what you are learning. On the downside, scheduling can be a hassle. Against the advantage of providing superior information, you must weigh a meeting’s cost in money and time for setup, travel, and conduct.
Face-to-face meetings are best when:
You want to establish relationships. Good relationships are based on trust. Trust travels better through direct contact than it does over phone lines or on the Web.
You want to advance relationships. Frequency of contact, shared values, and shared experiences are vital for relationships. You create shared experiences most effectively in face to face settings. For instance, a mechanical engineer participated in charity events that large real estate owners and managers participated in too. Working with them on these worthy causes greatly strengthened his relationships with them.
You want the contact to remember your involvement. If you introduce two people who are likely to receive high value from knowing each other, it would be wise to host the lunch when they first meet. Otherwise, they are likely to forget you got them together.
You need to move the client to follow through on a decision. Maybe a client clearly intends to hire you, but is always too busy to focus on the matter. If you are eye to eye, chances are the client will take advantage of the moment to get things started.
You can take advantage of trips and association meetings to reduce costs. Meeting with people is time consuming and expensive, often prohibitively so if the client is at a distance. If you have a meeting with one person at a client company, drop by to see other people you know in the building. Or take a later flight home so that you have a chance to meet with another contact in the same city. Use an association meeting to get face to face with dozens of people it would be impractical to go see.
You want to gather sensitive information. Phone calls are second best. Neither requires leaving a written record.
The Voice on the Phone
Telephone conversations offer many of the advantages of face-to-face meetings—minus the visual component. In compensation for this considerable loss, they cost you a fraction of the time required to go see the contact.
The increasing use of video technology is reducing the disadvantage of the phone call, but is not yet so common or sophisticated to do away with most in-person meetings. Scheduling telephone calls, though easier than it is for meetings, is often a challenge.
The telephone is best when:
You want to control the costs of maintaining a network and still get the benefit of give-and-take exchanges. A locally-based contact from your “A” List might get three or four calls from you for every time you meet. One from your “B” List might get between six and eight calls for every meeting.
You need a lot of give and take. In such cases, phone calls and meetings are usually more efficient.
You want to make an indirect probe. If, for example, you want to ask about progress towards the approval of your proposal, but don’t want to disturb the client yet again for this purpose, you can call to provide information you have come across about a competitor or something else of interest. Then at the end of the conversation, you can say, “By the way, as long as I have you on the phone, have you made any progress on…?”
Sending an email provides neither visual nor oral information about either the sender or receiver. We are left with the bare words. The ability to let the exchange extend naturally to a number of subjects until it settles on one productive for both parties is largely lost, except in correspondence between close friends.
In return for these limitations, email offers solid advantages. Instead of extemporaneous back and forth, it provides the opportunity for deliberate articulation of ideas. Both writer and reader can consider the ideas at their own pace. And the ideas expressed can be easily preserved or passed on to others.
Scheduling problems are not an issue for either party, making email the only practical means of communicating in some cases. It is almost always less costly than a meeting and sometimes less so than a phone call, especially for information that requires no give and take.
Email is best when:
You want to remind clients of what you do and that you are thinking about them. One goal of frequent contact is to capture mindshare. Sending clients regular emails, as long as they have substance, is a way to do that. As one rainmaker said to me, regular mailings of articles and whitepapers that demonstrate the firm’s intellectual capital are one way of saying, “Ping! I’m still here. Ping! I’m thinking about you. Ping! This is what I do.” But avoid passing on what a client might consider spam.
You need to confirm meetings and to summarize their results. This is a good professional practice and gets you two extra Pings from the meeting—before and after.
Your message is long and complex. You can plan what you say more carefully and the reader can review your thoughts unlimited times and mull them over.
You want to create a record of a contact.
Each time you contact a client or other member of your network, you are, in effect, assessing the desirability of these alternative forms of communication in terms of practical considerations, your objectives, and your and your contact’s preferences. Usually, this is a split-second decision. At other times, it requires reflection. Here are three basic guidelines to check your decisions against:
You need to use a mix of communications channels with each person in your network. This means that if you have communicated with someone largely by email over the past year, it’s probably time to get face to face or to talk by phone with that person again.
A client’s preference for one channel over another should weigh heavily in your choice, but it is not the only consideration. Your needs count too.
Telephone calls are the great compromise between the other two channels to your contacts. They provide most of the information obtained face to face and allow give and take, but they cost a fraction of what a meeting does in time and money. You need to make lots of phone calls.
So, before you send an email, look deep into your heart and ask yourself if it is the right thing to do, or you want to do it because you are…well…chicken! And if you are agonizing over the choice between email and phone, get over it! Pick up the phone and dial!
Ford Harding is the founder and president of Harding & Company, a firm that helps consultants, accountants, architects, attorneys, and engineers win new clients. Harding has trained professionals around the world in the art of selling and marketing services.
Harding is the author of the classic book, Rain Making: The Professional’s Guide to Attracting New Clients, Creating Rainmakers: The Manager’s Guide to Training Professionals to Attract New Clients, and Cross-Selling Success: A Rainmaker’s Guide to Professional Account Development.
You might also be interested in these interviews with and articles by Ford Harding:
Cross-Selling Your Way to Success
Dealing with Unreturned Phone Calls
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