How Do You Communicate with Web Savvy People?

My Recent Expe­ri­ence Look­ing for a Ser­vice Company

Most of the work I do since I start­ed my com­pa­ny has been work­ing with ser­vice con­trac­tors nation­wide. So when it comes to know­ing the local con­trac­tors: who to call when I need ser­vice on my home, I do not always know who to call. I will rely on the Inter­net and pray I can find a good com­pa­ny I can trust. When I moved to my new home 5 years ago, the con­trac­tor installed cheap car­pet in my bed­room. He said it was top of the line, and he was def­i­nite­ly lying. It did not last all that long! This time around, I reached out online to a few local car­pet com­pa­nies to see what they would charge to install a qual­i­ty pad and car­pet. Now, before I get to why I am writ­ing this post, bear with me for a minute. Because I am in a lot of meet­ings, work­ing on projects, on and off lots of phone calls, I rely a lot on email to com­mu­ni­cate. I also trust that ser­vice com­pa­nies have good sys­tems in place to ser­vice demand­ing, Inter­net savvy peo­ple like me. I am par­tic­u­lar — yet rea­son­able. I am not look­ing for the cheap­est price. I do not have time to always get 3 – 5 bids. I am one of those busy guys who real­ly just wants a com­pa­ny who will show up and do what they say they will do for a price that I can afford.

Who Will Respond

So I went to the web, did a search, found 4 car­pet com­pa­nies local to me, and cut/​pasted my job descrip­tion to each one of them. I gave them my phone num­ber and email. I did not care if they emailed or called. I just want­ed to get my part of the job done: get­ting in touch with these com­pa­nies. I did not intend to get four bids, as I was pret­ty sure I would not hear from all four of them. Here is where it gets inter­est­ing! Close to 24 hours lat­er, I got an email from a sales rep who answered my ques­tions. She gave me a few ball­park ranges and kept the con­ver­sa­tion going. It still took almost a day to respond! No one respond­ed with­in a few hours (dur­ing busi­ness hours). Two oth­er com­pa­nies (rep­utable ones) still have not respond­ed in almost a week as I write this. The 4^th com­pa­ny respond­ed by putting me on an auto­mat­ed email cam­paign. I could not believe it. I get emails from this com­pa­ny with basi­cal­ly a buy­er’s guide on floor­ing! No per­son­al ser­vice. There is a place for email automa­tion, but this was not one of them!

Who Got My Business?

I could have picked up the phone and called the 3 com­pa­nies that real­ly did not respond. Yet that is just not me. I rely on them to be the pro­fes­sion­al, not me. So the car­pet com­pa­ny who actu­al­ly respond­ed with a sales rep, came out to the house and gave me a bid was the one who won my busi­ness. Guess what, it was a lit­tle more than what I was think­ing too.

Are You Miss­ing Busi­ness Too?

You might be sur­prised to know there are more peo­ple out there like me. I am a GenX guy, but I act a lit­tle like a Mil­len­ni­al when it comes to using tech­nol­o­gy. Mil­len­ni­als rely very heav­i­ly on the use of tech­nol­o­gy and lit­tle on phone calls. If they do hap­pen to call an office and get an auto­mat­ed sys­tem, chances are they will hang up and not wait for a live per­son. That is just the way it is guys! Like it or not, that is the gen­er­a­tion we live in now. You might be miss­ing busi­ness if you rely on too much automa­tion, do not respond quick­ly or do not check over your sys­tems to see if your prospects are hear­ing from you at all! Some­times it can be as sim­ple as a bro­ken link on your website. This is a reminder to keep up with the times. That does not mean to have the lat­est and great­est soft­ware. No, it might just mean to make sure you are com­mu­ni­cat­ing with your prospects in a way they want to com­mu­ni­cate with you! You will win more business!