Recently I had a sales person calling me non-stop, leaving messages everywhere, and all I could think was - I’m too busy to get back to him and wish he wouldn’t waste my time with all these messages, then I left another voicemail for someone I was chasing up.

So my Eureka moment came. In the last two weeks I have been calling people back just to let them know I am not looking at X service and am very happy with my current suppliers.

The result – I don’t have ten email messages and lots of voicemails waiting for me every time I come out of a meeting, and people in my team haven’t left dozens of post-it notes on my screen for someone who has called me five times. This makes me hope and believe that this person is no longer chasing me and can now concentrate on a real and valid prospect.

I have spoken with a few people about this latest phenomenon, there seems to be a consensus that there has been a drop in manners over recent years. When we talk about B2B being about developing and maintaining relationships, it seems we have forgotten how to interact with our fellow man and that technology is leading to these faceless interactions and a degradation of manners across the board. I know we are all busy, but are we actually wasting more time by not calling someone back, even if it is to say, “I can’t look at it right now but let’s talk in six months”.

It has become far too easy to drop someone an email or send a text message and think right that’s the end of that. If someone has spent the time to write a ten-page proposal for us then do they not deserve at least some feedback and constructive comments?

One group of people who suffer more than most is the sales or business development teams. I think we all need to start offering them a little bit more courtesy and respect because they are people too (including recruitment consultants).

I have also noticed this trend for my Relationship Management team. Many of them have been called out to help on an urgent project and invested time on finding a solution and pulling together a team and then, nothing, radio silence, maybe for several weeks. The reasons for the project going on hold are valid, i.e. another project has taken priority, budgets cut etc., but the silence does nothing to develop a proactive can do attitude from your Account Manager, a simple call to on the current status would go a long way to maintaining a good working relationship. 

People are now dating on line because they don’t have time to meet people, I just hope we are not getting too busy using these online tools that were meant to make communications easier to actually listen and respond.