Interesting; I ran essentially the exact same experiment a while back (June to August 2012) and had a different conclusion!
-- 68 incoming consulting leads
-- group A: responded to 34 with "let me know how I can help"
-- group B: responded to 34 with "would <date-and-time> work to discuss this further?"
-- group A: 20/34 (59%) responded, 14/20 (70%) led to contract negotiation stage
-- group B: 6/34 (18%) responded, 5/6 (83%) led to contract negotiation stage
So "let me know how I can help" outperformed (p < 0.01) suggesting a date/time.
There's a few possible explanations for the discrepancy:
* The kind of clients I had are different than Robert's clients. At the time I mostly did software engineering consulting and pair programming, and my clients were small units in mid-to-large size companies.
* I only ran mine on incoming leads, not outgoing (solicitation) leads. It sounds like Robert did it for everything.
* Content of the e-mail matters, not just the last line. Perhaps the way I write my e-mails is such that kicking the ball back to them is better for me, whereas Rob's style means a different strategy works better than him.
* Something changed about how people read e-mails in between my experiment and Rob's article.
I think you're mixing up two things. He's only suggesting using the <date-and-time> trick if the client actually already expressed his want/need to meet. In your case, Group B is a poor ending because you are still offloading work to the client: having them figure out what would have to be discussed (and taking up more of their time).
If -you- need to discuss things further it may sound like you're the one who is confused and that does not evoke confidence. "Let me know how I can help" is probably better than what "let's discuss this further" implies. (OP calls this hand holding.)
Exactly. The problem with the open-endedness of "let me know how I can help" is not always with respect to time. It is more often with respect to what will actually happen next. The statement "let's talk at XX:YY on the ZZth" only works if time is the primary indefinite aspect of the next step.
In the case of these prospecting emails, the primary indefinite aspect of the next step is "what value will you provide".
I am just impressed by 68 people mailing you saying "can you quote". How ?
Edit: Well, it seems that 100K on stackoverflow, a robust background across a wide variety of languages and domains and a nice smile seems how.
edit edit: that seems sarcastic or otherwise trying to diminish the effort and discipline and passion needed to develop and maintain an online persona that will be attractive to clients. I do not mean to - but that is what I get from a scan of his public profiles - and frankly I would be willing to hand over many software projects to him just on those profiles. Its interesting the value I place on them, yet the small amount of attention I pay to my own.
I didn't track this for purposes of the experiment, but most people were referrals from past clients. I think consulting-type work benefits from this a lot, because you work with a lot of people. Your professional network gets larger much more quickly than if you were taking on 3-to-6-month projects, just because you work with more folks over time.
Really? I'm going to have to throw my email on my Stack Overflow profile and see if it actually works like that. I didn't figure anybody actually looked at them unless they were trying to find an old answer of yours or something.
I just alternated whether someone was in group A or B, because I responded to the e-mails as they came in, at the end of each day. So it wasn't truly random, no. On the other hand I didn't control when someone wrote in to me, so arguably it at least wasn't fully in my control.
Of course, it wasn't double-blind because I was both writing the e-mails and conducting the experiment too.
Like your second to last bullet say, it's not the last line, it's the entire email. The article is really about how to frame the entire email so that you add value, take control, and provide guidance, instead of writing an email asking for guidance.
From a purely semantic level, I'm not sure that your group B is any different to what the OP is suggesting is their problem:
"If someone wanted a meeting, I’d suggest a time and instead of saying, “Let me know if this works for you.” I’d switch that out for, “If not, than X time/day also works or I’m free at X time/day.”
Instead of your response, the aligned with this article statement is to state a next step as a statement and forgo the question "Let's discus this further tomorrow, otherwise I'm available on Monday at midday". It's a matter of suggestion compared to questioning, These trigger different cognitions on the part of the receiver.
Its the distance down the road to forking over cash you care about - group A (the specific email line) led to a better outcome for the GP - more interested clients.
That's an interesting thought, although I think it's a confusing call to action. Also I'm not really in a position to do another experiment since I just started building something else now! (http://uphex.com)
As a "client" (although small one) I can confirm this. I've been outsourcing some work, and when I was trying to collect offers from various professionals you definitely had two distinct kinds of actors.
Those who did suggest follow-up actions and did lead you on and those who didn't.
As a client I always felt insecure and confused by those who didn't. Where did that leave me? What was the next step? Was I responsible for the next communique? With what topic? How does this affect my agenda? Where do we go from here?
With the people who did suggest follow up items and who had specific actions and priorities, it was easy for me to respond. I already had an agenda, ready and served. The path on further was already set.
So yeah. I guess people are different, YMMV and all that, but as for me, I can attest that this sort of approach works much better.
Good writing. When we say "Let me know how I can help", we are asking the other person to do work because then they have to think about what/how they need help with. Most of the times, people are lazy and you might be surprised but the fact is that they don't want to do work even for their own requirements. Instead, They want to hear solutions.
This even applies to environments at very big companies. At my current client (Fortune 100), we work with distributed global teams and we have those dreaded meetings all the time. In those meetings, we in IT will ask business for requirements which makes sense. However for projects that need quick turnarounds with tight deadlines, we sometimes don't have the luxury of getting detailed requirements. In fact, the more we discuss requirements, the more we are stuck. Asking "how I can help" usually gets a response of "Sure. what are you proposing". You cannot keep going back and forth with "depends on what you want". The reason is that even though we all would like the best solution with all features, it just does not work that way in real world because time/resource/budget is limited. Instead of asking "how can we help", we analyze the current process and then propose multiple options. So in essence, we say "Here is how we can help". It then makes it really easy for business to say "Yea we like Option 1 and if that's the best you have for now, let's go with it". Boom, you just got a decision maker to agree and you are on your way. You are also that guy who got shit done.
I used to think that we get big bucks as consultants because we are awesome devs/designers/PMs/BAs whatever. But after a decade in the industry, I got wiser. You are valued as a consultant because you get shit done by taking the initiative to propose solutions to clients. Then you deliver it to them. No one gives a shit about anything else. Really.
>people are lazy and you might be surprised but the fact is that they don't want to do work even for their own requirements.
And they will pay to avoid even the easiest chore. We got tired of not getting any response from people using our free trial and briefly required them to call us to activate their free trial. People started paying for the first month rather than make a phone call and some that paid never even used it. Crazy.
Isn't this the idea of a mail in rebate? That they attract attention and people buy the product but hardly nobody bothers to mail them in? I might be off base on that, but that was my thought as to why they are offered.
> they don't want to do work even for their own requirements ...
Of course, and they shouldn't want to. They ought to be focused on providing business value to their clients. And hiring a consultant is a step taken when they're over their heads and need a hand.
>> Could I really boss the client around and tell them what they needed to do?
Yes, that's exactly what they are paying you for.
We had a disaster recovery project that sat on a todo list for 6 years. It got passed around from person to person, discussed at every other meeting we had, but nobody ever did a single thing about it. We brought in a consultant who did no magic other than delegating tasks to a few people, and the project was completed in 4 months.
We paid a guy to come in and tell us what we already knew we had to do. I'm not sure if we did it because now we were spending money on it, and it'd be wasteful not to follow.
As someone who spent a fair deal of time in sales, this is the worst thing you can do to close an email.
You're essentially saying, "If you need me, contact me." and allowing the client to just opt out of working with you.
In sales, you always had to have a path where you want to lead the client. "Let's put together a time frame for A, B, C and I follow up when A is done." or "Once the budget is approved, we're going to do A, B, and C by this date." It also shows you're invested in the client and invested in what they want to accomplish.
It does take extra work to nail down clients, and at times will feel like you're trying to herd cats, but it's quite effective in the long run.
I've done a fair amount of freelancing and this blew me away in that I had never thought about it. I guess I had developed a sort of instinctive understanding that clients want solutions not just another employee to manage, but I never thought about how common (and often vacuous) this phrase is. Excellent insight.
I humbly disagree. Dating is different because rejection is felt more keenly -- by the asker and by the typical askee.
If a man does as you suggestion, he is making the woman reject him multiple times if she does not want to go out with him (which is the most common case) and he is putting the conversational burden on the woman to explain whether the rejection is only because she has plans that particular weekend.
Readit News
-- 68 incoming consulting leads
-- group A: responded to 34 with "let me know how I can help"
-- group B: responded to 34 with "would <date-and-time> work to discuss this further?"
-- group A: 20/34 (59%) responded, 14/20 (70%) led to contract negotiation stage
-- group B: 6/34 (18%) responded, 5/6 (83%) led to contract negotiation stage
So "let me know how I can help" outperformed (p < 0.01) suggesting a date/time.
There's a few possible explanations for the discrepancy:
* The kind of clients I had are different than Robert's clients. At the time I mostly did software engineering consulting and pair programming, and my clients were small units in mid-to-large size companies.
* I only ran mine on incoming leads, not outgoing (solicitation) leads. It sounds like Robert did it for everything.
* Content of the e-mail matters, not just the last line. Perhaps the way I write my e-mails is such that kicking the ball back to them is better for me, whereas Rob's style means a different strategy works better than him.
* Something changed about how people read e-mails in between my experiment and Rob's article.
If -you- need to discuss things further it may sound like you're the one who is confused and that does not evoke confidence. "Let me know how I can help" is probably better than what "let's discuss this further" implies. (OP calls this hand holding.)
In the case of these prospecting emails, the primary indefinite aspect of the next step is "what value will you provide".
Edit: Well, it seems that 100K on stackoverflow, a robust background across a wide variety of languages and domains and a nice smile seems how.
edit edit: that seems sarcastic or otherwise trying to diminish the effort and discipline and passion needed to develop and maintain an online persona that will be attractive to clients. I do not mean to - but that is what I get from a scan of his public profiles - and frankly I would be willing to hand over many software projects to him just on those profiles. Its interesting the value I place on them, yet the small amount of attention I pay to my own.
Of course, it wasn't double-blind because I was both writing the e-mails and conducting the experiment too.
"If someone wanted a meeting, I’d suggest a time and instead of saying, “Let me know if this works for you.” I’d switch that out for, “If not, than X time/day also works or I’m free at X time/day.”
Instead of your response, the aligned with this article statement is to state a next step as a statement and forgo the question "Let's discus this further tomorrow, otherwise I'm available on Monday at midday". It's a matter of suggestion compared to questioning, These trigger different cognitions on the part of the receiver.
-- group A: 14/34 (41%) led to contract negotiation stage
-- group B: 5/34 (15%) led to contract negotiation stage
Its the distance down the road to forking over cash you care about - group A (the specific email line) led to a better outcome for the GP - more interested clients.
Those who did suggest follow-up actions and did lead you on and those who didn't.
As a client I always felt insecure and confused by those who didn't. Where did that leave me? What was the next step? Was I responsible for the next communique? With what topic? How does this affect my agenda? Where do we go from here?
With the people who did suggest follow up items and who had specific actions and priorities, it was easy for me to respond. I already had an agenda, ready and served. The path on further was already set.
So yeah. I guess people are different, YMMV and all that, but as for me, I can attest that this sort of approach works much better.
This even applies to environments at very big companies. At my current client (Fortune 100), we work with distributed global teams and we have those dreaded meetings all the time. In those meetings, we in IT will ask business for requirements which makes sense. However for projects that need quick turnarounds with tight deadlines, we sometimes don't have the luxury of getting detailed requirements. In fact, the more we discuss requirements, the more we are stuck. Asking "how I can help" usually gets a response of "Sure. what are you proposing". You cannot keep going back and forth with "depends on what you want". The reason is that even though we all would like the best solution with all features, it just does not work that way in real world because time/resource/budget is limited. Instead of asking "how can we help", we analyze the current process and then propose multiple options. So in essence, we say "Here is how we can help". It then makes it really easy for business to say "Yea we like Option 1 and if that's the best you have for now, let's go with it". Boom, you just got a decision maker to agree and you are on your way. You are also that guy who got shit done.
I used to think that we get big bucks as consultants because we are awesome devs/designers/PMs/BAs whatever. But after a decade in the industry, I got wiser. You are valued as a consultant because you get shit done by taking the initiative to propose solutions to clients. Then you deliver it to them. No one gives a shit about anything else. Really.
And they will pay to avoid even the easiest chore. We got tired of not getting any response from people using our free trial and briefly required them to call us to activate their free trial. People started paying for the first month rather than make a phone call and some that paid never even used it. Crazy.
Of course, and they shouldn't want to. They ought to be focused on providing business value to their clients. And hiring a consultant is a step taken when they're over their heads and need a hand.
Yes, that's exactly what they are paying you for.
We had a disaster recovery project that sat on a todo list for 6 years. It got passed around from person to person, discussed at every other meeting we had, but nobody ever did a single thing about it. We brought in a consultant who did no magic other than delegating tasks to a few people, and the project was completed in 4 months.
We paid a guy to come in and tell us what we already knew we had to do. I'm not sure if we did it because now we were spending money on it, and it'd be wasteful not to follow.
Fantastic summary and advice. I try to apply this not just at work but also when proposing activities with friends and family.
You're essentially saying, "If you need me, contact me." and allowing the client to just opt out of working with you.
In sales, you always had to have a path where you want to lead the client. "Let's put together a time frame for A, B, C and I follow up when A is done." or "Once the budget is approved, we're going to do A, B, and C by this date." It also shows you're invested in the client and invested in what they want to accomplish.
It does take extra work to nail down clients, and at times will feel like you're trying to herd cats, but it's quite effective in the long run.
"Would you like to go out some time?" bad
"I really like you, would you like to meet?" terrible
"Let's go out at the weekend, <barname> is really great" good
"I am free Tuesday and Friday, let's get a beer and continue this conversation in real life" good
If a man does as you suggestion, he is making the woman reject him multiple times if she does not want to go out with him (which is the most common case) and he is putting the conversational burden on the woman to explain whether the rejection is only because she has plans that particular weekend.