If you’re like me, you stand 6′ even, are married with two kids, play video games and enjoy wearing irreverent t-shirts. Also, you track all your sales calls and emails in a CRM like Highrise. That gives you a quick overview of how many unanswered emails and voicemails you’ve left.

So here’s my question: when do you give up/move on/let them call you?

When I used to do medical sales years and years ago, I had no limit. I didn’t mind not getting calls back. I would start to leave messages like,

This is the tenacious Rich Brooks calling. If you’re impressed by how often I call now, imagine what life will be like when I’m working for you.

Or:

This is Rich Brooks from Ultra Care Services. Since I haven’t received a cease and desist letter from your lawyers, I’m guessing it’s OK to keep leaving voice mails for you.

It didn’t always work. In fact, I’d say it didn’t work on the majority of people. However, occasionally I’d catch them at their desk and they would finally relent and meet with me. Some of those people turned out to be great customers, since they rarely saw sales people I had little competition as long as my company did a good job.

Yes, occasionally I’d piss someone off. But, if you’re not pissing off someone it means you’re not working/selling/marketing hard enough.

These days I don’t do any cold calling; most of my outgoing calls are to people who have first reached out to us. However, they are often difficult to reach and won’t return phone calls. Generally I’ll make 3 – 7 attempts, depending on how interesting the job seems, then I’ll send an email along the lines of:

Hope everything’s going well. I was hoping on following up on that email/phone call/contact form you sent me, but I’ve had difficulty reaching you. I don’t want to be a noodge [from the Yiddish], so I’ll hold off and let you contact me.

It’s amazing how often this gets someone to respond. I think it’s because often we see those incoming emails, we can’t deal with them, so we just wait until they come back again at us. By stopping that cycle (and letting the person know we are stopping them) we force them into making a decision of whether they want to continue or not. This is no guarantee of work; just that we’ll have to send more emails or leave more voicemails. At some point every sales person may have to decide that the return on investment just isn’t worth it.

Anyone else have any tips for getting email or voicemail responses, or rules on how many unreturned messages they’ll leave before moving on?

Rich Brooks
Tenacious

I just got another RFP (request for proposal). You think I’d be happy. Another opportunity for business. Another opportunity to sharpen my writing skills. Another opportunity to dedicate a couple of hours of my day into tailoring a proposal for Web design and Internet marketing that I will then deposit into a black hole. (Oops…I let my snarkiness show.)

The company that sent me the RFP? Never heard of them. We have no previous relationship. They got our address wrong.

I don’t know if they got my name and hundreds of others from a phone book or if they carefully culled vendors down to three based on word of mouth and previous experience.

I don’t know if they’ve already made their decision–say, for the brother-in-law of the marketing manager–and just need two other proposals to keep up appearances.

The fact that the date on the cover letter is June 13th, 2008 and the submission deadline is May 16th, 2008 doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies. In fact, nothing about an RFP gives me the warm fuzzies.

Why Your RFP is Bad for Your Business

Imagine you sent out RFPs to a few dozen prospective dates, like you
were running your own reality TV show. Do you think you’d get responses
from the best looking? The smartest? Your soul mate? Or just the most desperate, with lots of time on his or her hands?

RFPs are a filter that turn away good vendors and let in desperate ones who will jump through any hoop to get business. Vendors who have more free time than business acumen.

Good, busy vendors don’t have time for faceless RFPs unless there’s something SERIOUSLY sexy about them. (Angelina Jolie: feel free to send me an RFP.)

The purpose of the RFP (I assume) is so that you can compare apples to apples. However, when you’re talking about the service industry, that’s impossible. There are a lot of great vendors out there who I might compete with, but their proposals will look nothing like mine.

Good Web sites (and many other things) require a partnership between
vendor and client. It’s a relationship. Good relationships start with a
conversation, not an RFP. Asking for staff bios won’t get you a better
Web site. Asking a vendor how they can drive more qualified leads to
the site and how they can help you convert them might.

There’s a time and a place for RFPs, but they come after a conversation with perspective vendors, not before. Yesterday I received an RFP from a associate who I do know, and we’ve had a number of positive conversations in the past.

You can be sure I’ll respond to hers.

Rich Brooks
Angie, I’m Waiting…

If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner like me, you probably find it difficult to take time off.

Before vacation I get really stressed, trying to get everything taken care of before I leave. Then I question whether I can afford to take time off at all and start telling people that I’ll be checking emails often and will get back to them as I can.

As time has gone on, I’ve realized that this is a sure way to burn out, and leads to resentment of your work. Also, I’ve realized that the business can survive without me…at least for a little while. We’ve hired good people who know their jobs and get make decisions in my absence.

Also, as I took last week off to "recharge my batteries," my wife Cybele stayed behind to run the company, respond to new inquiries, continue to do her own job as Project Manager and be a mom to our two girls. (She’s quite a woman.) As I wondered to my buddy Jeff whether it was strange that I would take some time off without her, he said, "you live with her, you work with her, you see her all the time. She probably needs a vacation from you."

Touché.

Although I spent much of the week here in Maine — when you live in "Vacationland" it doesn’t make a lot of sense to leave during the summer months — I also got a chance to visit a friend in Provincetown, do a little fishing and go on a whale watch. I’ve never done a lot of fishing, but I reeled in a 39" striped bass. Took about ten minutes (at least it felt like that) of fighting that thing to get it on the boat. If you take a close look at the photo above you can see the sweat and tears (mostly sweat) that went into landing it. No fish has ever tasted so sweet.

The rest of the week I spent riding my bike, listening to The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, and spending a little extra time with Cybele and the girls. I also broke down and bought a D-SLR I had been eyeing, the Nikon D-40. I set up a Flickr account to post some of my favorite shots. Feel free to check it out and give me some constructive feedback.

Why am I telling you all this? Because if you feel you can’t afford to take vacation then you’re long overdue. Life goes on. Yes, you may miss a lead or lose a sale, but there will be others, and you’ll be in a better place, better able to land that next project.

Rich Brooks
Recharged