Most cell phones are not appropriate for conducting business — especially if you’re selling something!
This may come as a surprise to many of you, but part of your poor performance is directly linked to the interference your cell phone (or your Voice over Internet Protocol/also known as VoIP) is running during your presentation.
Let me give you an example.
I had a sales call from overseas yesterday. The poor dear wanted to sell me business development services.
I was paying more attention to the tinny crackle and pop on the line that was telling me this was a Voice-over-IP connection and the murmuring in the caller’s surroundings than I was to the value proposition she was trying to punch across.
The entire four minutes on the phone with her was an annoying experience for me. Chances are excellent I will buy nothing from them.
The workplace lesson here
American business has molded many great success stories, and it’s no coincidence that the rise of American commerce beginning in the 1880s (overtaking Great Britain as the world’s largest source of manufactured goods) coincided with the telephone’s introduction; it was first patented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell (who is not to be confused with its invention/development) and used by businesses factories and warehouses to communicate large-scale real time information.
This technological innovation made possible, for the first time, connections between flesh and blood people talking with one another.
People were encouraged to leave (Becky could call Mama on the weekends) the cocooned backwaters and hinterlands of America and flock to the industrial centers that promised growth and advancement.
Managers could call subordinates on the carpet from long distances; fathers and mothers could congratulate/scold sons and daughters; and industry could flash forward to a time where the standard rose greatly for many.
It could be called the greatest invention of the 19th century for the command it gave the human population over reach.
Nowadays, the telephone’s effectiveness is being smooched down by management’s ever-manic desire to reduce costs.
Do you want to cut costs on this?
The mode of communication that allows your employees (and yourselves) to speak clearly with one another is not one of the areas you want to drive down costs on.
The technology does not exist in the airwaves that allow you to gamble your business success; maybe it will come — probably it will come — but it’s not here yet.
Being able to call in to a meeting while driving is a wonderful (and also frighteningly dangerous) component to our lives today, but how many times has the connection dropped off just when something important was being said?
How many times have you struggled to hear through the cackle and cacophony of someone calling from the doctor’s office — the baseball field — the airport?
How many sales have been lost/how many meetings have been missed/how much have you really saved when you consider the opportunity cost of your penny-pinching ways?