I was woken up by some weird person at 5.15AM today trying to selling me something. Not exactly the most influential time to call. Sometimes selling requires some very careful timing!
Successful selling I have found over the years requires a lot of different variables to line up for things to work. One topic I got an interesting reminder about was at 5:15AM this morning as I lay in my bed recovering from a cold and some long awesome hours.
Like many people today I use my mobile phone as an alarm clock and turn the ring and sms alerts down before I go to bed. The phone still makes some squawks and one good one that many make is a high pitch ring when you get a “Facebook Message in” (which is very tricky to turn off in most phones without at times shutting down your morning alarm too).
As I awoke to see the message it was someone on Facebook I am barely friends with (but I must have connected with in the UK) who I don’t really know acting like “My Best Friend” inviting me to some entrepreneur event going like the next day. They were like “Hey I know it’s late notice and it’s Friday, but did you want to go to a conference over the weekend?”.
I told them no thank you and I was busy and I said to them over several sentences it wasn’t very nice waking me up and “it’s not cool”. This person went crazy and started berating me as I slept in my bed, saying I was playing “Victim” and they were just trying to help me out, and I am this and that – and the person was an abusive bully / fruitcake! I couldn’t help but start laughing in the respect that I knew I would be blogging about them that evening and I told them to please stop harassing me and then I unfriended them off Facebook. I have had a lot of funny things in my life happen to me, but some stranger over Facebook who made a mistake just ripping into me with some type of psychotic release is a great story I will be telling at seminars for years to come I can promise you! (Even writing this article is amusing me).
Moving on from the humour of my morning it got me thinking about the importance of the selling process using that as an example. This person was obviously trying to send me to some type of “Free Event”, where they probably would have got a commission if I say purchased something (or was an employee of that company with a vested interest).
What I found interesting was that the person was say trying to make money out of me and generated quite the opposite result. They not only didn’t get the sale, I also unfriended them immediately and I would never ever do business with them again. Putting aside humor, jokes and ego – commercially it was a disaster for them and I would imagine that would have shook them up equally as it did wake me up.
What this one came to in essence was timing. Why on earth did the person message me at such a silly time? I just don’t think they thought it through and all they had to do was wait say 3 hours and I would have been much more open to receiving the message. Even if I didn’t say go to their event, we may have started some type of dialogue which could have lead to something developing later on.
This is a very important aspect of Selling – “Timing”. If you are selling something to someone (be it asking for their time, money or both) you got to make sure you are polite about it and doing it at the right time. You wouldn’t sell new technology to a cafe owner at peak coffee time, you wouldn’t sell a new computer system to a CIO on Monday’s (where they are probably stuck in meetings all day) and likewise you wouldn’t wake up someone to peddle your goods.
It’s great that you pick a perfect time to sell to people when it suits them. Remember, if you are asking someone to do business with you, you are asking them a favour – so do it in a very nice, respectful way, at a time which is on their terms!
I hope you enjoyed this article and feel free to enjoy a laugh at my expense this morning. Timing is everything in life, especially in selling! Happy Days Awesome Friends and thank you from Edward Zia – Marketing Mentor who loves sleeping into 6AM!
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