What Does Your Business Phone Number Say About You?

According to new statistics, 27 million companies are doing business in the U.S., with approximately 553,000 new businesses being filed each year. While only a percentage of these may be competing in your specific industry, that is still a lot of competition for your prospects’ hard earned wages and profits. The one piece of crucial information involved in any marketing campaign, advertising message, or conversation with a potential prospect is your business phone number. What does your phone number say about you and your company? For those thinking it is “just a number,” nothing could be further from the truth. No matter where you operate or with whom you do transactions, toll free numbers and vanity numbers have proven to make a huge impact on an enterprise’s success or failure.

Even if you are only doing business locally, a vanity number, whether it spells out a significant word or phrase or is a numeric vanity number, makes your business stand out as an established, credible, and professional company that is both successful and reliable. Regardless of the type of product or service in which you deal, consumers are becoming more cautious about with whom they do business, and they want to be assured those businesses will be around in the future. Whether you are a CEO or a marketing director, put yourself in your prospects’ shoes and ask yourself by looking in the phone book or at your competitors’ numbers side by side, “Who would I call for my needs?” You may be the best company in your industry, but customers will never have the chance to find that out unless they pick up the phone and call your business phone number.

A toll free number speaks volumes about your company and can be THE reason why potential customers decide to call you. When choosing the right vanity number or numbers for your business, think how you can relay your strengths to your prospects in those 7 or 8 digits. Are you the fastest in your industry at what you do? Are you the easiest company with which to deal? Are you the best at quickly and successfully communicating with the customer. The bottom line is if your toll free number or business phone number doesn’t spell out “800 SUCCESS,” then you are telling consumers “800 IT’S A MESS”! What is your customer thinking? How about something like, “If a company hasn’t even bothered to spend ten minutes to find a good toll free number, what else have they not bothered to do? Will they have problems shipping the product? Will they produce a faulty product? Maybe I should call someone else.”