Now You will Never Wake Up a Client in the Middle of the Night

When you’re placing calls to clients prospects colleagues you need to be keenly aware of where they are in the world these days.

Even one person businesses are international you’re going to have clients from any country any time zone in the world.

You don’t want to call someone it goes to their cell phone and wakes them up at 3:00 in the morning even though it’s 3:00 in the afternoon in your office.

So be aware if you’re not sure.

Then just go to Google and type in time in that city it’ll tell you what time it is.

Obviously if some prospect calls leaves a message at 7:00 in the morning.

You don’t know where they’re calling from and you can’t call back until 10:00.

No one’s going to really fault you for that if they haven’t alerted you as to where they are and you can’t know for any other reason.

But if it’s an existing client customer or prospect who tells you what city area or what country they’re in.

You need to be aware of time zones.

You also need to be aware of their normal workweek.

Some of my clients in the Middle East.

They take off Friday and Saturday.

So if I call beyond 8:00 a.m. my time Thursday morning I’ve already hit their weekend.

So that’s being rude to them so you need to be aware of that.

Other clients of mine even in the Middle East they have the same Saturday Sunday days off that we have here in the United States.

So don’t assume it’s something you can check in about two seconds on Wikipedia or Google but the less you’re returning someone’s call or calling them for the first time hitting them on the weekend the better.

It’s common sense on the one hand but if you’re not used to dealing with people people internationally it’s not quite so common there.

Also we’ll talk about this in the voice mail section.

Some cultural differences with respect to voice mail.

There are some cultures where it’s not just the young people it’s people of any age just don’t use voice mail.

You might find it annoying if you wanted to work in that culture.

You’ll have to deal with it you’ll be better off sending an email perhaps a text if you’re calling and you do like I do and you do a lot of calls through Skype.

They’re not going to see your number figure now.

So you got to figure out some other way of letting them know you called where you reached out to them because they won’t say just by what pops up on the phone.