When you're placing calls to clients, prospects, colleagues, you need to be keenly aware of where they are in the world these days even one person businesses are international, you can have clients from any country, any timezone in the world. You don't want to call someone, it goes to their cell phone, and wakes them up at three in the morning, even though it's three in the afternoon in your office. So be aware, if you're not sure, then just go to Google and type in time in that city. It'll tell you what time it is. Obviously, if some prospect calls leaves a message at seven in the morning, you don't know where they're calling from when you can't call back until 10. No one's gonna really fault you for that if they haven't alerted you as to where they are and you can't know for any other reason.

But if it's an existing client, customer or prospect who tells you what city they're on or what country they're in, you need to be aware of time zones. You also need to be aware of have their normal work week. Some of my clients in the Middle East, they take off Friday and Saturday. So if I call beyond 8am, my time Thursday morning, I've already hit their weekend. So that's being rude to them. So you need to be aware of that other clients of mine, even in the Middle East, they have the same Saturday, Sunday days off that we have here in the United States.

So don't assume it's something you can check in about two seconds on Wikipedia, or Google. But the less you're returning someone's call or calling in them for the first time hitting them on the weekend, the better. It's common sense on the one hand, but if you're not used to dealing with people, people internationally, it's not quite so common. They're also we'll talk about this in the voicemail section. Some cultural differences with respect to voicemail. There are some cultures where it's not just the young people, it's people of age.

Ah, just don't use voicemail. You might find it annoying. If you want to do work in that culture, you'll have to deal with it. You'll be better off sending an email, perhaps a text. If you're calling and you do like I do, and you do a lot of calls through Skype, they're not gonna see your number figured out. So you got to figure out some other way of letting them know you called or you reached out to them, because they won't see just by what pops up on the phone.