PI in the Sky – Paul Irvine

I’m amazed at how frequently this situation occurs. Vendor calls up to introduce himself, and after a typical “I’m Stone Moss and we have the best consultants around…”, I often get “I’d really like to get to know you and earn your business; can we do lunch maybe next Tuesday?”

That’s it! I have no reason to want to go on a date with you, but for some reason, you think I should. I’m flat out trying to grow or run my business, and you think that I’m interested in a fishing trip to check you out just in the off chance that there might be something useful for me? Those aren’t good odds. Is a free lunch an incentive? Rarely.

There are two successful outcomes on a cold call like this, one you can nearly always be assured of – the opportunity to drop me an email, establish a contact, and give me some useful links that explain what you do, and is it okay to check back with you in a few weeks. That’s about as much as you can expect to get at this stage.  I may not get to your info, I may not even need your info, that’s where luck comes in. But that’s also why sales, cold call especially, is a numbers game. The more you call, the greater chance one of ‘us’ will actually read or need what you have.

The second possible win, is if during that first intro, you have something interesting about you or your product that is timely. It should be a differentiator, but it doesn’t have to be; all it has to do is give me a hint that it might eliminate my problem. That is, it coincides with a pain point that is high on my mind right at that time. That requires skill on your part (the lure), luck (the coincidence), and again a numbers game (casting enough calls).

After that, it’s easy… because I will call you.

The time you try to call me is often overlooked. I don’t know what your work calendar is like, but I would hazard a guess that your sales meeting starts on the hour? or on the half-hour? Odd that… so does mine! And so do my weekly software development team meetings, and so do my exec team alignment meetings, and so do… you get the idea.

Calling me to ask if its a convenient time at 10:57 is highly likely to be met with “Not really…”.

What’s the best time to call? It’s a hit or miss of course, but 15 or 45 mins past the hour are definitely playing better odds!

You want to do business with me. Good. But unless you can hook me within five seconds or so about why do I even care you exist, you wont succeed. Let’s take a recent email I received that didn’t pass the “So what?” test; (edited to protect the guilty)

YadaYada Inc offers highly experienced software development teams, project managers and architects. YadaYada Inc teams have worked with leading startups and larger companies such as BigFirmA and BigFirmB, where we have deployed well engineered and cost effective solutions.

Why choose YadaYada?

Extensive experience with C#, .Net, .Asp and SQL

Leverage US based Senior Developers, Architects and QA teams

Leverage on-site project teams who work closely with your R&D team

Successful customer list spanning start-ups to F100 companies like (example firms were big but not relevant to this)

So…. let’s analyze this… you’ve worked with startups and F100 (everyone!), you’ve got software developers, I would sincerely hope you work closely with your clients, and you are somewhat established. Well… that puts you in the same ring as 797 or so other software/consulting firms.

See why it failed? You might think these are all good qualities. They are. But “So what?”. They aren’t qualities that differentiate you from the two dozen other similar emails I got this week.