A modern day B2B buyer tale
When businesses calculated the cost of answering the phone, did they ever calculate the cost of not answering it? Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to contact a handful of relevant manufacturing businesses regarding a genuine commercial opportunity.
I was poacher turned gamekeeper and was ringing up to speak to commercials with a genuine opportunity. What could possibly go wrong…
What followed was a masterclass in how difficult modern organisations can make it to reach a human being.
Hanging on the telephone
Company 1. The first receptionist answered the phone while eating her sandwich.
Company 2 – 12 days in I still can’t talk to a senior commercial decision maker…. In fact one guy I reached on the security gate couldnt even put me thru to SALES. I redialled 5x to try and help him put me thru to someone! My final request was “ if the building was on fire who would you call – put me thru to them.” I come back to this one later in the article.
Company 3. “You need the MD but i cant put you thru email info@ with yr request”. Luckily for them I found his mobile number and got hold of him directly for a chat. As a secondary outcome he is reviewing the call handling policy in his business!
Company 4 The icing on the cake might be …. “Oh the person you need is on maternity so i will have to check with her”. So am i waiting 10 minutes and if so i will go and get a cuppa or 10 months until she gets back from maternity.???
Sales, service its just in-humane
A major part of business life is speaking and interacting with people. Creating a great impression for everyone that interacts with your business or the business you work for is everybodys responsibility and it is entry level stakes. It is all part of the machine that pays your wages, bills and keeps the bloody lights on. It really isnt about you at all and the whizzkids behind those screens cant really get rid of the hard work so start looking after those businesses.
This was not the end of my interaction with Company 2. After reaching out to the SLT as detailed on Companies House the CEO called me and we had a very healthy conversation about communication, accessibility and business behaviour. His biggest reveal was that he had experienced exactly the same frustration when trying to buy services from other businesses this week too! Knock me off my soapbox with a feather. A senior leader running a business with thousands of employees and billions of pounds of turnover still struggles to reach people when he wants to buy something.
If that’s true, what chance does everybody else have?
Was a great reception really expensive?
Industry seems to have done the homework on all the costs of answering the phone cost per call, headcount, reception costs administrative overhead, did anybody consider or estimate the cost of not answering the phone; Opportunities never discovered, partnerships never formed, suppliers never found and the customers who simply gave up.
The problem with opportunity cost is that it doesn’t appear on a management report and Ai doesn’t deal in it.
It’s complex and multi-dimensional
Technology and automation have undoubtedly created efficiency and helped us manage the averages of what has happened in the past. However if you are going to move past those averages (which are ever diminishing) you need new opportunities coming in from new places, directions and all sources outside the algorithm
The outliers and extremes are where your marketing and sales brains need to be working. Humans find the extremes and everything that doesn’t fit the algorithm. What we discover beyond the algorithm can then be fed back into the system, improving the average for everyone else.
It takes human curiosity, judgement and a beginner’s mind to discover what we don’t know or where we haven’t yet ventured. Long may we be complex and complicated and may we very very quickly take ownership of those superpowers and make business fun vibrant and filled with possibility (and sales deals) again.
The best analogy I can think of to the demise of the Office Manager/Reception department is the ‘bring back matron’ campaigns. Whether it improved outcomes or not is debatable, but the idea resonated because people remembered there used to be someone who knew what was going on.
Businesses used to have that person too. The receptionist or office manager who knew how to get things done or who to go to get sh@t done. Today we’ve got ticketing systems, gatekeeping (or blocking depending on your perspective) and please email info@.
We’ve removed friction (and accountability) for everyone internally but made it bloody impossible for a potential buyer.
I suspect the cost is enormous, but because it can only be measured in opportunities that never happen, nobody (or Ai) notices.
Please email info@
The systems are efficient but the KPI needs to be are they effective. Will the next commercial advantage be simply being reachable.
If Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone today, would we embrace it or would we ask him to email info@?
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