After being asked by Jordan Adams to contribute to his LoveMediaSales site for media salespeople I also joined his LinkedIn group. One of the discussions posted there was asking. “Are sales floors getting quieter?” I thought I’d share my brief answer on my blog too…

Yes, sales floors are getting quieter and I agree that this is in part down to the use of email and social media. I use the latest technology extensively, probably more extensively than most and I am quite a techno-geek at times and it is most certainly powerful, effective and allows you to leverage networks. It also makes contacting people quick and easy. Every salesperson should know how to use social media properly… but that’s another story…

• Many salespeople do not pick up the phone when they should and this costs them money.
• Many salespeople and businesses rely on email contacts and fail to build open and honest relationships with their clients.
• Clients are less open, less honest and find it easier to say, “No” and give no feedback when not having to actually speak to anyone in person.
• Even though they may get less sales the secondary gain for salespeople of working this way is that they do not have to hear a “No.”

Because they now have other options many choose to progress sales via email and social media when they should be building personal relationships and progressing the sale in person. Many may not like the truth but for most, despite what they say, this progression onto using technology when personal contact would have been better is more about distancing themselves from personal rejection than anything else. Why have someone say “No” to your face when you can avoid it?

To take a simple email example…

A salesperson speaks with you personally about something and then follows up with an email a few days later asking if you are interested. You “park” the email because you are busy and unsure of how to progress and then a few days later you get another one asking the same. You decide you don’t want it and say so via email. You have made your mind up.

What can the salesperson do about this? Very little.

They were absent at the time of the decision. They knew nothing about your thought processes and they now have limited options to do anything about it without appearing overly pushy.

The supporting information could have been sent by email. Arranging to talk could likewise have taken place that way but the sales conversation should have taken place in person or on the phone. Only that way can you build a relationship, develop personal trust and get real opinions and guage the message, the person and the relationship using your communication skills. Via email you can do none of this.

In my experience, this use of email is common place in sales now. Many (most) salespeople use email to try and SELL. Email is a support tool not a sales tool. It supports the sale. It does not make the sale.

And don’t even get me started on the uses and abuses of social media…

p.s. I don’t see this as a new problem by the way… There were plenty of salespeople who used to solve the avoiding personal rejection by moving callbacks to letters or just not making them at all!!

Related posts:

1. How To Use Email When Prospecting
2. Cold Calling Blues?
3. Sales Training Tip For The Day: Get Up Close And Personal

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!

Related posts:

1. Sales Prospecting Persistence On The Costa Blanca
2. Should Cold Callers Ask, “How Are You Today?”
3. Sales Training Tip For The Day: Get Up Close And Personal