Increase Your Conversation Rate

Show Notes

• If you talk to someone, the chances of them doing business with you go up. With that in mind, you want to have more conversations in your business.
• One of the best ways to have more conversation is through texts rather than a phone call. Texts:
  • Save time
  • Are courteous, if you respect how you communicate
  • It’s quicker to get to an outcome
• Fix Your Funnel uses a pre-call SMS as an effective way to increase conversations.
• By sending a text to customers prior to a call, it allows customers the opportunity to let Fix Your Funnel know if they are ready for their call.
• Why do people not pick up the phone? They are are typically busy, not interested, or they don’t recognize the number.
• You don’t want to call people who aren’t interested. Texting first gives someone an opportunity to choose ahead of time before you spend time on the phone.
• Text only once. If someone doesn’t reply to your text, they are also sending you a message -- “not interested.”
• Don’t ask for business via text as it’s not effective or polite.
• A text message should invoke a response that leads to a conversation.
• If you are going to write something for marketing, think of a specific person and write to that person. The message then becomes personal.
• Write your text in a way that will cause the other person to want to text you back.
• Avoid being deceptive and treat people with respect and most people will politely let you know if they are interested or not.
• The Fix Your Funnel Team quadrupled the number of conversations they had per call being made just by adding a pre-call SMS. (Their contacts had contacted them via text first.)
• Build a business by making conversations and use the pre-call SMS to increase your conversation rate.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Most people that close business by talking with people tell me this phrase: if I talk to someone, they do business with me. So if that's the case for your business, then all you need is more conversations.

If you want to have more conversations, then start with a text instead of a call. It saves time. It's courteous if you respect your customer and you respect the way that you communicate with them, and it's quicker to get to an outcome.

We have a feature that we use with our dialer that's called the pre-call SMS. It's an effective way to increase conversations. Essentially what it is is we send a text message before we make a call to somebody, allowing them an opportunity to let us know if they're ready for the call or to answer the call when we do.

Why do people not pick up the phone? Well, think about your own situation. It's probably because you're either busy, [00:01:00] maybe you're not interested, or most likely you don't recognize the number. One of those three covers most of the reasons that we don't pick up the phone when somebody calls.

If I send a text message to somebody, and believe me, I've done this a ton of times, where I called first, they didn't answer, I sent them a text, and then I called again. Then they answered. The reason why is because when you get that text, number one, it lets you know, okay, I know who this is and I can make a decision about if I want to talk to them now.

Most frequently what happens when we do this is they either tell us, they're not interested, which is fantastic in business, believe me. Number one thing you want to hear is I'm not interested, please don't call me again. You don't want to be calling people who aren't interested. You only want to call the people who are interested.

The other thing that we hear more frequently than that though is, okay, call me. Or, [00:02:00] I'm busy. I'm in a meeting. Can't take a call right now. How about you call me at this time. An appointment to call somebody in the future is almost better than anything else because it gives you some structure to know when to call someone.

But the bottom line is, when you send somebody a text before you call, you increase the odds of actually having a conversation with that person. There are some things to watch out for.

Don't pester. Text at least once, but don't text more than that. If somebody doesn't reply off of a text, they're also telling you a message. They're saying, not interested. Please leave me alone. They're afraid that if they respond, that it's going to go further, so don't do that.

Don't solicit via text. What do I mean? Don't ask for business for your text. You can let somebody know, hey, I'm calling because of this, but don't ask them to do business with you via text. It's not effective and it's annoying.

Any text message should evoke response that may lead to a conversation. [00:03:00] That's the way you know you're using text message right, is when it invokes a response that leads to a conversation. So when you're thinking about a text message, always think about a person.

That's one of the secrets for all marketing. If you're going to write something for marketing, always think about a person. Don't think about a group of people, don't think about a group of people you would like to be getting in their attention. Think about a specific person. And talk to that person.

When you do that, your message becomes personal. When your message becomes personal, it becomes effective. Write to a person when you're doing a text message, write to a person in a way that would cause them to want to text you back.

Some of the things that you can do that would be wrong in the scenario are being deceptive or kind of hidden. Or kind of the link bait type things you see that come through your social network where people are trying to get you to click. Don't do that kind of stuff. Treat people with respect. Talk to them like you would talk to your friend, your grandmother, whoever. If you do that, then what's going to happen is you're gonna have great results.

[00:04:00] People that are not interested will courteously tell you they're not. Some might be rude, doesn't matter, that's going to happen with all business. But a lot of people are going then going to be able to tell you that they are interested and how you can get ahold of them and you'll start having more conversations.

Internally, and not everybody's going to have this experience, but internally, we quadrupled the number of conversations we had per call being made simply by adding this one thing into our repertoire.

It must be said, we had permission to text people because people had texted us initially in all these cases. I never recommend cold texting people, but when we create leads, we create warm leads, so people that are asking for some information. Does not mean that they want to talk to us on the phone. That's why also we use the pre call SMS because it gives us the opportunity to see if they do want to talk to us on the phone. If they do that, we can really help them.

If you build a business by making conversations and then taking those conversations to doing business, then you're going to want to use the pre call [00:05:00] SMS to increase your conversation rate. I guarantee you'll have more sales when you talk to more interested people. This is Ryan Chapman from Fix Your Funnel. Hope this helps you today.