Pluskb Innovations

I agree this is very common problem across all domains. I prefer to have personal interaction (in person or over phone) with customer. Responses over mail/sms are sometimes mis-leading. During personal interaction, based on customer’s body language & voice pitch you will be able to properly judge, customer’s interest and motive.
If customers insist to send proposal over mail, then in that case I confirm the date for personal interaction to walk him through proposal and clarify any queries. At the end of interaction I make sure to make agreement between both of us for follow-up(feedback) date. In such case customer don’t feel that we are too much following up and at the same time our purpose gets fulfilled.

Once you have interacted with that customer couple of times, then interacting over email is quite safe and effective.

That definitely is a common problem. When I was freelance years ago, follow up was always a tricky problem. I didn’t want to be pushy yet I wanted to get the project. I can’t say I ever found a great solution to the problem; it seems I just got better at feeling out my best approach the more experienced I became.

Anyways, this may be a little out of the ordinary but I have an idea: if you’re open to experimenting a bit, I’d like to see if I can help your closing ratio. I own a web based proposal product and I’m sure I’ll improve my product in the process of trying to help your win more deals. Maybe we can take it offline for further discussion if the idea appeals to you.

To ask a client to commit to something of that nature has a distinct aroma of ’sales’, and people tend to steer away if they sense that.

But offering something for free is generally a safe move, so perhaps something along the lines of a free workshop, whereby someone of good public-speaking skills could deliver a ‘general’ chat on the importance of web, the importance of web-site design, and the importance of the promotion thereof?

I’m probably wildly off the mark, but having the public perceive you as the authority on a subject could have its benefits?

When I’m working with local clients I like to go over the proposal with them whenever possible but for a lot of my business it isn’t local and so going over a proposal with them in person is difficult.

Most of the time the only communication I have with a client is through email.