When your business life line massively depends on the Internet and prospect querying for "Interpreter + Tokyo", you must be to deliver right away. There used to be the email, the written text that created a layer of time delay to fine tune your answer to an inquiry for service. It is still here, but when you are online over Skype, an inquiry into your fees and availability may pop up out of the blue, and your competence at selling yourself in a flash is yet another competence they don't, nor will they never teach you at schools. I must spell the obvious here, but if you don't want to deal with the stress of showing that you are indeed available to answer inquiries on the spot, don't show you are online now over Skype.
If you do want to stand at the edge of liaison interpreting freelancing, then, discussing about readiness is nothing mundane, but instead, mission critical, as your mission is to get the job with the best of conditions, that is, your conditions. In a month's time, I received two live inquiries, that is, messages popping out of the blue over Skype, followed in minutes if not seconds by audio conversation. There's no time to call the sales manager. You are the sales manager and building rapport of confidence while at the same time checking the validity of the prospect asks for experience. It could ask for some discussions to get ready before rather than after.
I am not yet confident boasting what you should do, self-help book style like. But here are a few things I believe may stand as buds of strategies.
- Take control of the conversation by asking question following the first question or introduction from the prospect. Usually, prospects are cautious, and you should be cautious too, but weird prospects will show weird very quickly. If the prospect doesn't mention it right away, ask about the industry she's involved with, even if the prospect's first concern is your fees.
- Grab as much as essentials as fast as possible : who, when, where.
- Over Skype, check the caller information card. More than often, it is not informed enough. Blank cards are not totally suspect, but they may be.
- Try and jump to the prospect's company web site while talking. The point of course is to find out on yourself the URL, or simply ask.
- Show professionalism but check first how familiar with Japan the caller is.
- Go over the edge by offering suggestions - do you have business cards in Japanese, will you come with translated version of your documents? No? You should, definitely, etc.
- Engage the caller to tell more about the context, then add additional questions to clarify the big picture, not to go into details.
- Look to close the discussion after 10 minutes, pledge to send a recap mail with your fees within 10 minutes, hang off and write away that mail right now. A template may be a good thing to use but cautiously. All customers are not made equal.
- Don't wait for feedback more than 24 hours. You have an agenda to manage for other prospects.
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