What should we do if the key person in charge cannot be contacted by the foreign trade telephone?

When we make ocean calls to foreign trade customers, we may often encounter situations where the person responsible for procurement is not in the company. In other words, our phone call has passed on, but we could not find the key person.



Because this is the first time for us to call a potential customer, and we did not make an appointment with the other party in advance. If the other party is not aware of the call, the other party's operator may ask you to call back at another time and hang up the phone. What should we say at this time? Is this the end of the call?

In a normal foreign trade call, when we start to communicate with each other, we usually prepare some simple greetings in advance as an opening remark, such as Hi, good afternoon, if I can speak to xxx, please? Then introduce yourself to each other, introduce the company, products, and services. It is easier to be accepted by the other party than long-formed rhetoric at first, and allows him to listen to us in a step-by-step manner.

The longer we keep talking with each other, the more likely you are to get the information and resources you want, such as the name of the company's purchase and contact email. Therefore, when the other party is not purchasing in the company, we can proactively say that we will make a return call and ask the other party about the appropriate time for the return visit during the communication process. For example, do you know when he will be back? If the operator replies to you that the company buyer went to another city to attend a meeting, or visited a partner supplier, and the return time is uncertain.

At this time, you have to briefly introduce yourself who you are, which company you are from, the reason for calling, etc., so that the operator has a certain impression of you, and can take the opportunity to ask the other person, such as, is there anyone else in purchasing department you think I can speak to? See if there are other people responsible for purchasing matters in the company, and see if you can contact other key positions. In fact, the operator of the other party may not know whether you are a supplier or a supplier seeking cooperation. If they understand that you want to talk to a person in the purchasing department, they may transfer you to the landline phone of the purchasing department.

In addition, there will be a situation that the buyer of the other party is on a business trip and will not return to the company for a short time. The other party sets the phone as a voice mail box, and the reply to the past call is for you to leave a voice message. In other words, if you can't call the other party back in the short term, and the operator of the other party does not give you the purchase email or other contact information, you can first learn about some company information from the other party at this time, such as company imports situation, which countries are mainly imported from, etc., to get more useful information. Then consider whether to leave a message to the mailbox of the purchase.

When we communicate with overseas customers, the priority is to send development emails to the other party. If the email is not answered, we will choose to call. It can be seen that these two methods are for being able to "get on line" and "talk to each other". In the case of voice messages, in fact, friends who are doing foreign trade development know that after leaving a message, the response rate of the other party is relatively low, and it is often in a state of "no audio" and no response. This development effect is relatively general.

If the customer is relatively high-quality and worthy of development, you can choose to leave a voice and audio for the other party. Here are a few things to note:
One is to keep the content of the message simple and concise, and avoid long discussions. Because the other party must have received a lot of messages during the period of business trip, when you come back to concentrate on processing the messages, it is difficult for you to draw the attention of the other party and let the other party listen.
Second, in addition to starting from the perspective of matching our own products and products made by customers, we must also consider customers and provide them with valuable things that customers need. From the information we know in advance, such as the pain points of current cooperation with existing product suppliers, unmet needs, wanting to open up a new market, etc., we can grasp the other party’s concerns and highlight the main content in the message and go straight to the topic discarding unnecessary greetings.