PROFESSIONAL SELLING: Selling with Cell Number 

Selling professional services is different from selling products. People can look at, touch, and otherwise poke, prod, test, and evaluate a product before they decide to buy. And while whom they buy it from may be important, the fact is that the product itself usually takes primacy.

• Not so with professional services, where the decision to buy must be made before the service can be evaluated. So what does the client representative really buy? In a word, YOU. If the buyer likes you and trusts you, in part because you make the individual feel important to you, the sale is yours.
• So, what do you do to make the person feel important to you? We can tell you one thing you shouldn’t do, and that’s have your cell-phone number printed on your business card. What does the card say about you to a prospective-client rep when your cell-phone number is printed on it?
• It says, “I don’t care who you are. Call me any time of day or night. I don’t care. I don’t have a life.” Now imagine a situation where you take your card without a cell-phone number on it and write your cell-phone number on the back of the card just before you give it to the prospective-client rep.

What does the card say? It says, “Here’s my private number. Call me when you need me to help. You’re important to me.” Especially when it comes to relational sales, little things don’t mean “a lot.” They mean everything.