Sales Training Article: Getting Effective Results from Email Prospecting
Pia Proal, Vice President Sales, I-Zones
Information Tools for the Digital Age
If you just love cold calling, stop reading right now and go polish your Ferrari. This little tale is for the rest of us for whom those two little words create a variety of emotions from dislike to outright dread.
You have to admit that effective prospecting (nice way of saying cold calling) is the secret to any kind of selling success, no matter what method you use. Practitioners of CustomerCentric Selling™ know exactly how to handle the process once the sales game is on, but all of us need every advantage we can muster to get those initial prospects into the sales funnel and on to our forecast list.
The last decade has seen our combined sales prospecting efforts gradually use up the market's tolerance for direct mail, letters, phone calls, faxes and lately even broadcast email. None of these methods produces much of anything, but a miserable return on time spent and a one or two percent reply rate that is seen as very good indeed.
So what can you do? Well look, promise not to tell anyone, and I will share with you a proven prospecting method, that can get you between ten and twenty percent response rate every single day. What's more you never have to cold call anyone. Every call is at least a little warm - interested? Sure you are, so here goes...
Most busy prospects have call filtering, an admin to trash faxes, a junk email filter and no time to speak to you. What they do have however is an ego. How many Vice Presidents do you know who don't like the odd stroke or congratulation?
To take advantage of this all you need is a some kind of email client, or better still an email prospecting system, a few minutes a day, and a calendar to set appointments. It turns out that virtually everyone will accept text-based emails, especially ones that congratulate them on something or in someway. At least ten percent of those people will read these emails (if they are short) and send a reply that starts a conversation. That's right, ten percent! The only secret to this is the careful selection of the email subject line (more on that later) and a tightly worded message that has a simple call to action such as, "send me a quick reply and I will call and arrange an appointment." Our sales team sends
Our sales team sends out ten to twenty of these emails via our email prospecting system a day. The process takes from fifteen to thirty minutes depending on how much research you need to do about the company. An average response of one or two replies allows them to call and set appointments with no direct cold calling - oh, and you nearly always get by the call-blocking admin, because the prospect has copied them on the email asking you to call and set the meeting.
So in your CustomerCentric Selling™ course you can learn exactly how to implement a killer email-prospecting plan. Or read the next issues of this newsletter for a practical way to get started.
Pia Proal can be reached via email at pproal@intranet-zones.com. The Sales-Zone, a sales and marketing portal, is a full-featured electronic library, administrative notice board, FAQ application, competitive and market tracking system and email prospecting tool. The product helps create a customer centric sales environment that allows sales representatives and other employees to rapidly locate documents and information as and when they need to in the minimum time possible. The supporting applications all share the objective of helping to reduce sales administration time and to increase the level of best practices and collaboration between sales and the rest of the company.
