How hard to push

Having a discussion the other night when I should of been talking about stuff other than work I came to the subject of sales.

How pushy should you be? Its not the easy question to answer. I guess if you are selling something cheap or wanting to get someone to change their electricity supplier it must be OK to be a pain in the backside (well if it wasn't) why are they.

But we supply a high quality product. No one is going or can decide over the phone but it you are not enough on the case you can loose a valuable lead because you didn't make one more phone call.

One thing we have learnt in the past is that we needed to be more pushy than we were. We would send a drawing and a quote and wait to be contacted. Quite often (enough to make us not realise ourselves that something was not as good as it could have been) we would get a call back and 'close the deal' but we were missing a few.

A marketing agent said we needed to chase these leads and after initial worries we gave it a go. To our surprise it didn't drive our customers away. In fact customers seemed to like that we where checking they had received the drawings and wondered if we could help them further.

But the biggest gain was that we got a few customers that said that they didn't really want what we had drawn. Of course now that we called them we could address this issue. Usually its easy to solve because they may not like the doors or the colour or the budget but now we could correct this and on the second try we almost always get the commission.

I believe that its all part of being a bespoke manufacturer. Not a lot of people get the idea that they can have what they want or when they get the drawings don't realise that they can be changed.