Never Wake Up a Client in the Middle of the Night

• 00:04 When you're placing calls to clients, prospects, colleagues,
• 00:08 you need to be keenly aware of where they are in the world.
• 00:11 These days, even one-person businesses are international.
• 00:15 You can have clients from any country, any timezone in the world.
• 00:19 You don't want to call someone, it goes to their cell phone and wakes them up at 3 in
• 00:24 the morning, even though it's 3 in the afternoon in your office.
• 00:27 So be aware.
• 00:29 If you're not sure, then just go to Google and type in time in that city,
• 00:33 it'll tell you what time it is.
• 00:35 Obviously, if some prospect calls, leaves a message at 7 in the morning,
• 00:40 you don't know where they're calling from and you can't call back until 10.
• 00:44 No one's going to really fault you for that if they haven't alerted you as to
• 00:48 where they are and you can't know for any other reason.
• 00:52 But if it's an existing client, customer, or prospect who tells you what city
• 00:56 they're in or what country they're in, you need to be aware of time zones.
• 01:00 You also need to be aware of their normal work week.
• 01:07 Some of my clients in the Middle East, they take off Friday and Saturday.
• 01:13 So if I call beyond 8 AM my time Thursday morning, I've already hit their weekend.
• 01:20 So that's being rude to them so you need to be aware of that.
• 01:24 Other clients of mine, even in the Middle East, they have the same Saturday,
• 01:28 Sunday days off that we have here in the United States.
• 01:32 So don't assume.
• 01:33 It's something you can check in about two seconds on Wikipedia or Google.
• 01:38 But the less you're returning someone's call or calling them for the first time,
• 01:43 hitting them on the weekend, the better.
• 01:45 It's common sense on the one hand, but
• 01:48 if you're not used to dealing with people internationally, it's not quite so common.
• 01:53 There's also, we'll talk about this in the voicemail section,
• 01:57 some cultural differences with respect to voicemail.
• 02:00 There are some cultures where it's not just the young people,
• 02:04 it's people of any age just don't use voicemail.
• 02:08 You might find it annoying.
• 02:12 If you want to do work in that culture, you'll have to deal with it.
• 02:14 You'll be better off sending an email, perhaps a text.
• 02:19 If you're calling, and you do like I do and you do a lot of calls through Skype,
• 02:22 they're not going to see your number or figure it out.
• 02:25 So you gotta figure out some other way of letting them know you called or
• 02:30 you reached out to them because they won't see just by what pops up on the phone.

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