Short Attention Span Sales

The Weekly Sales Tip

Bill Farquharson

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Email and Sales Apps and Teams, Oh My!

June 17, 2024

There are many, many, MANY communications channels in use. In this week's Short Attention Span Sales Tip, Bill Farquharson gives you a communications pecking order to set expectations and mitigate the possibility someone is out there awaiting a response to a message you never saw.

Good morning!

Emails and sales apps and Teams, oh my.

Want to communicate? You can text me. You can Slack me. You can email, Gmail, message, side bar, and chat me.

And that’s just a few of the more popular communication vehicles. Add to that Teams and Asana, Trello and Basecamp, Teamwork and ClickUp and you might want to block off the morning just to keep up with it all.

I wish I had advice for consolidating your communication world, but it is likely beyond your pay grade. Clients might insist on one app while your in-house preference is another.

It is more than a little out of control and most definitely out of yours. With way too many options, there is a lot of room for miscommunication, misinterpretation, and missing information.

In my crazy communication world, we have emails, texts, Slack, and the audible system known as yelling from office to office. Allison and I have found the best way to sort it all out is to commit to using certain channels for certain functions. Slack, for example, is used for Sales Vault-related business as well as to distribute my weekly content with our varous publication partners. Text is for personal communication like, “Want to go hit a bucket?” or “Lunch!!!!!” And yelling occurs when it’s just easier than replying to a message and we know the other person is not on the phone.

What’s important is two things: First, obviously, find out and use your customers’ preferred medium and second, make clear the communication pecking order:

Wicked important? Call me!
Need an immediate response? Indicate that in your message.
Didn’t hear back? Assume I didn’t see your message.

The worst thing that can happen is someone expecting a response from a message you didn’t receive. While there is no solving this issue, you can minimize it by establishing these rules.

Oh, and don’t forget to communicate them. You can can text, Slack, email, Gmail….

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For more information on The Sales Vault, call, email, text, Slack, Asana, or carrier pigeon Bill Farquharson at SalesVault.pro or 781-934-7036