How to use email when prospecting

I would like to know what to do when the only contact information you have is an email address. What do you put in the email, just bare fact, do you give as much as possible. Usually when I email a potential new client, I am not getting any response from them. Do you have any suggestions?

This is a great sales training question and one which there is no hard and fast answer to. Email is still a relatively new technology and the use of it in the sales process and the etiquette behind it is changing all of the time.

Certainly, some salespeople are over reliant on email which has led to some sales experts believing that email has no place in the sales process at all. A sales trainer friend of mine believes that you should never use email when selling at all and that you should always pick up the phone instead.

On the other side of the equation, some sales experts are advocating email “prospecting” as a first contact choice rather than the phone because “cold calling is dead” (Idiots!).

So who’s right?

Well, I guess that depends on what you believe and what you are trying to achieve. Ultimately, I believe that, as with many debates, both parties are right, at least in part.

In my business I get a lot of inbound sales enquiries about sales training products, sales seminars and keynote speeches for sales teams. Some of these enquiries I like to handle personally so a meeting will be set up with me by my admin team. In theory, this could be done by email as, after all, the prospect rang in and wanted to speak with me. In reality however, this is not the case, as less than 50% of prospects respond to this type of email despite the fact that they requested the meeting in the first place!!

Conclusion – people are really good at ignoring email.

I have clients that I talk to regularly, clients who have flown me to speak at their event first class, clients who have chauffeured me to their venues and treated me like royalty, clients who have profusely thanked me for coming to their events despite the fact that they have paid me…

Yet they still don’t respond to emails.

Maybe people just get too many emails to deal with. Perhaps people put them to one side and then forget to deal with them. Maybe people are just inefficient when faced with this kind of overload of information. Perhaps your sales emails are just not getting through to your clients at all.

Whatever! Socially and culturally it does seem that not responding to emails is, if not acceptable, certainly not a major crime!

So where does all of this leave us in our email dilemma?

Simple.

Email is a tool. It is a tool that you can use to help you in your sales efforts. Email is a tool that can save you time in your sales process. Email is a tool that can help you to boost sales success.

But email is also a weapon that can destroy your sales efforts if you become lazy or over reliant on it. Email can kill your sales dead. For example, salespeople chasing proposals by email is a cardinal sin! “Just checking to see if you want to move forward” emails are destined to produce far worse results than salespeople who talk to their clients face to face or on the phone!

Email should be part of your sales campaign not your whole sales campaign. If you have only the email address of your client then by all means send them one but don’t sit back thinking that you’ve done a hard day’s prospecting! You haven’t. There are many other ways to find contact details for your clients and you need to employ some of them here!

In answer to your question about the email itself, it depends again what you are trying to achieve, however, and as a general rule, less is more. Keep your email focused on benefits to your client. You want your email to be inclusive. You want your email to encourage your prospects to want to ring you to find out more. Give out too much information and they won’t need to call you; too little and they won’t see the need to ring you!

As a sales superstar you need to maximize your efforts and your results by utilizing modern means of technology to supplement and support your sales efforts. That’s supplement and support not replace!

Email is a powerful tool but also one that can be abused very easily. It does not release you from the effort and hard work required in becoming a successful salesperson.

Make sure that you are using it correctly!

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