Well, you are here and you read the headline. 

But wait, Philipp, you think – there is no such thing as too much customer contact, right? 

The answer is – it depends (did I make it to easy for me?)

It depends on the stage where your customer is at along the Sales Path, it depends on the contact level of your department – e.g. when you are just moving towards Inside Sales, you should be working on increasing your customer contact, because naturally you would have to little contact. 

However, there are actually several cases of customers being contacted too much or being contacted at the wrong time (which I will cover in another post). 

And you definitely want to avoid making any of these mistakes. They are potentially harmful to your business and your success. 

#1 There is no real reason to talk, and you call too frequently

Imagine the following situation (As a seller in IT): The customer has spent their IT-Budget for the year, which they invested into a innovative new plattform, and you already know that their next year’s budget will be spent on an infrastructure renewal project. 

Being the good seller you are, you have provided him with a demo and material for him to inform himself about all the things your company has to offer. 

How could you contact too much? Usually in a setting, where your company needs to deliver results, and the focus is put on output KPIs, meaning you are asked to increase your call time and quality call time. 

In this situation you will have managers telling their employees to call, no matter what. And the Sales Rep who has to deliver some results, will possibly overcontact the customer. 

And it is obvious. How are those call sessions going? Well, the first few calls after having exchanged the communication as stated above will be a positive exchange of informally stating that there is no new information. 

But over time, the customer will think to himself – what kind of idiot calls again and again? Is he lonely? Will he call me all the time and consume more of my time after I bought the systems? 

And those are thoughts you don’t want to have going through your customers head. 

So think to yourself – in situations where the information and timeline is clearly defined, should you be calling very regularly? 

In general the answer is no, it is more about calling every once in a while to be able to react to changes as the first of the possible customers vendors. 

Keep this in mind and you will not run into this trap. 

#2 Contacting to much at the beginning of the Customer Journey

In a normal Sales Interaction, you want to wait a while after an introduction call. 

Giving a potential customer an introduction will leave him thinking to put you into a box. 

So introduce yourself, give him your contact information and then leave him with the time to put you into that box. 

Calling him frequently in this period of time will again give the impression of loneliness. 

And consider you are the buyer and you actually have a decision coming up, but you’ve got somebody constantly giving you a nerve on the telephone. 

You might actually tell them a no or give them wrong information just for them to not continue to bother you. 

And taking the buyer’s view is also what helps you understand how to gauge in which time frames you are going to call. 

If you are a buyer, and you get a Sales Rep to call you in a frequency that gives you time to think about a solution for your problem, but also everytime that he calls he can provide something valuable in any form (follow-ups, innovativeness, information, or even just a small update) you will gladly enjoy these calls and feel like you are getting something out of it.

Conveying this partnership on top of just being a Sales Rep is what the whole concept of Consultative Selling is about. 

So make sure you follow along a somewhat natural customer contact point. 

You also don’t make friendships like this. Say you get invited to somebody’s birthday party and then you want to show up every day. This is just not natural and you will not be able to make a lot of friends using this. 

So trust your intuition and don’t go over the top at the beginning of an interaction. 

#3 You are annoying and focus on the wrong outcome

This situation explicitly applies in the context of too much contact. 

Of course it is never good, but it is especially bad if you are annoying at a high frequency. 

Consider this – did you know that 69% of people Opting out of Mail Newsletters do so due to their high frequency?

The mails they are receiving are literally just annoying. 

The company that is sending them is just annoying. It is too much content. 

They don’t opt out because of wrong information or non relevant material, but because of too high frequency. 

You got the message – contacting too much is not good and will yield negative results. 

So you say what should we do to grow our business? 

Well, according to Dagger, Danaher and Gibbs you should put your focus on contact duration and quality. Write a good mail. Have a long telemeeting.

Especially at the beginning of the customer journey, contact duration has shown to largely affect sales success while contact frequency had absolutely no success. 

As a sales manager, I would recommend you to set a KPI for your employees on value conversations and regularly appraise people that have long contact with customers. 

In my company, this effect is largely visible, and I have used it to my own success greatly. In a recent sales deal, having invested 15 Minutes right after receiving the lead to demonstrate my expertise, my value to the customer and my problem solving capability towards the customers situation I have been able to grow the sales over the transactional level, and added consulting on top of the product to sell. 

Summary

The last part of sign No. 3 could be a very good summary of all the information stated above. 

Focus on the quality of the customer interaction, not the frequency. 

This way you can avoid running into the common traps of Calling for no reason (You won’t because there is no quality to add to the conversation), Contacting too much at the beginning of the Customer Journey (again, after a long initial interaction you should have discussed, what your company is about, what they can offer to the customer and have given him enough information to put you into a box) and you will definitely not be annoying when you have valuable conversation. 

Keep these points in mind and try the best you can to take the right action with your company or department to avoid making these common mistakes. 

Until then, keep selling. 

Best
Philipp