Will Bachman  00:01

Welcome to Unleashed. I’m your host Will Bachman, I got an email this morning and I will read it to you in its entirety. We’ll do you have 30 minutes to connect this week name redacted, suggested I reached out to you to get some advice as I leave McKinsey and set up my own independent consulting practice. Would you have time for short call? Thanks, comma name redacted. That’s the whole email. Okay, so first thing I’ll say is, of course, it’s flattering when someone reaches out for advice. And I do try to be responsive and make time available, particularly when we have some connections such as a mutual acquaintance that said, Do you notice anything missing? That’s right, no phone number. No, I wouldn’t do an episode about this. If this email were the first time that this ever happened. But I get a handful of emails like this every day, someone asking to have a phone call with me. And they don’t provide their phone number. And I’m somewhat baffled, and a little bit annoyed by this phenomenon. So when I get emails like this, and there is a phone number, if it happens, I happen to have a few minutes free. Maybe I’m in a taxi or I’m walking to Starbucks or we’re ready for a break from work, then I’ll usually just try calling the person. Now this may seem like a really minor point. But failing to include your phone number, when you’re asking to speak on the phone with someone is a failure to demonstrate right side up thinking, which is a term that I picked up from David A. Fields in his book, The irresistible consultants guide to winning clients. And the core of right side up thinking is that consulting isn’t about you, it’s about them. So what would right side up thinking look like in this case? Well, make it easy on the recipient to respond something along the lines of name redacted suggests that I reached out to you to get some advice as a lead McKinsey and set up my own independent consulting practice. Would you have time for short call, My number is 1-234-567-8910. And you’re welcome to call without scheduling. If you would prefer to book some time, you can grab time on my calendar via this link. And then they would provide a link from one of the calendar tools. I recommend calendly and I spoke about calendly in Episode 73. So if you want clients or others to call you with opportunities, it helps to be contactable. And yes, being contactable means that you might get a few more phone calls from spammers. But you can block those calls. And I’m not suggesting that you necessarily put your phone number on your website, although you could consider putting a Google number on there that would take messages and transcribe them and send a transcript of the voicemail to you by email. So providing email is great. But sometimes a person with an opportunity would just prefer to speak with you live. So if they don’t have their phone number, there’s a decent chance they’ll just go on to the next person that comes to their mind. And you’ll never even know about the opportunity that missed out on. So if I’m trying to contact someone about an opportunity, and I don’t have their phone number and my address book, I’ll check to see if their phone number is included in their email signature. And it’s kind of frustrating that they don’t have an email signature. And there’s been plenty occasions when I just reached out to someone else instead. And I’ve even been in positions where I had a proposal from a consultant. And I wanted to discuss it with that person in a situation that was fast moving, so I don’t want to email them, I just wanted to call them. And there’s no phone number on the proposal, just an email address, and there was no phone number anywhere in her emails. So I’ve also been in a situation where I had a hard copy of a deliverable done by a consultant. And maybe I was like at a client who had handed me a deliverable by some other consultant. I wanted to speak to that person, but there’s no phone number or even email anywhere on the document. So my advice is, if you want to be contacted, do the following number one, add an email signature that includes your phone number to every email that you send both on your phone and on your computer. Number two, if you’re asking for a phone call, include your phone number and a calendly link in the body of your email since some people are not going to bother to look all the way down to your email signature. Number three, add your phone number to your LinkedIn profile and to your alumni profiles with your college, grad school consulting firms, alumni website, and wherever else people might look you up. And number four, include your phone number, and your email on your deliverables and proposals. Thanks for listening. We found this episode helpful. I hope you’ll share it with a couple of friends. And I would love to answer your questions on a future episode. You can email me at unleashed@umbrex.com Thanks