The Most Important Phone Call

The single most important phone call your dive store receives is the one in which potential customers call and ask:

• “Do you guys do scuba lessons?”
• “How much are your scuba courses?”
• “When is your next scuba course?”

In most instances, this is a potential customer’s first contact with your store. What you say and how you say it will, to a large degree, determine whether or not this person elects to become a scuba diver — and whether he or she chooses to do so through your store. This is your one and only opportunity to create new customers for your store, or lose them forever.

They say first impressions are the most lasting. This is the phone call where you make that first impression.

Unfortunately, most dive stores don’t get it. They say the wrong thing, the wrong way. Here’s an example:

“Hello, Joe’s Dive Shop…”

“How much are your scuba courses?”

“They’re $299, plus you need a $49.95 student kit and you need to supply your own mask, snorkel, fins, boots and gloves. There’s also a $75 rental for open water if you don’t have your own stuff.”

“Uh…okay. Thanks.” (Click!)

So, what went wrong here? The salesperson answered the customer’s question honestly, and was up front about all of the possible costs. What did he fail to do? A lot of things, but chiefly:

• The salesperson did not take time to identify the customer’s real needs.
• He used terminology the customer did not understand.
• He made his scuba course sound much the same as everyone else’s.

The topic of how to answer this one phone call is so important, we can’t cover it in single article. What we will address here is how to not make the three critical mistakes the salesperson in our example made. Avoid these mistakes and you will go a long way toward converting more first-time phone callers into long-term customers.

Identify your customers’ real needs »

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