While email should only play a small part in our prospecting systems, it is still a great communication channel and should not be ignored.
But how do we differentiate our emails from the dozens (or hundreds) of emails our prospects receive?
We sat down with a sales legend recently and he told us the only emails we should be sending are the ones that benefit our prospects’ lives and business.
Jim Cathcart, a multiple hall-of fame recipient in the sales, marketing and speaking world, shared with us that the best emails serve as ‘virtual hand shakes’.
As always, we’re using the TRIM system in order to trim hope from our sales strategy and build a follow-up system to keep prospects in front of us:
T- Trigger: Before we dive into how to systemize our emails, it’s important that we’re not wasting out – or our prospects’ – time. The trigger we have to have before loading any of our email templates, customizing them, or establishing our next follow-up point is:
Am I Talking To Someone Who Can Say Yes?
“If you don’t know who you’re sending an email to, you’re not ready to send the email,” Jim shared.
The first mistake many salespeople make in sending emails is that they target information-gatherer or gatekeeper in an organization. These are undoubtedly great people, but they don’t bear the ultimate responsibility for ensuring a strategic problem is solved. The person who does bear the cost of the problem they need solved always has the ability to say ‘Yes!’ when they are presented with a cost-effective solution.
How do you find out if you are sending an email to someone who can say yes?
“Tell me, are you the personal responsible for addressing XYZ challenge happening with ABC company this year?”
If it’s not obvious, email shouldn’t be our first foray into any organization. All of our campaign systems start with phone calls to identify decision makers before we start sending emails. That way, we can customize our emails to the value those decision makers are looking for.
R- Repeatable: We advocate the use of CRMs for our clients for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the ability to program outreach tasks to occur in between phone calls.
When tasks to send messages do appear, CRMs also allow salespeople to quickly select pre-loaded message templates that correspond with a given campaign system. The salesperson can then quickly access the template in an email, customize the message to the prospect, and send them from within the CRM. Additionally, because a prospect is being managed in a specific campaign that corresponds with where they are in their buying journey, when a task to ‘send email’ appears as part of a campaign, salespeople can quickly identify and select the email, social media, or direct mail template for that task in that part of that campaign, customize the necessary portions, check for any errors, and hit ‘send,’ moving on to the next prospect’s task for that day.
I – Improvable: Open rates on emails are a great indicator of how good an email’s subject lines are, but another ratio Jim shared with us was a much more critical factor to improve our emails:
M – Measurable: Response rates. How many times do our emails generate a reply or a phone call? Keep in mind, that is why we are sending our emails! That’s why we should also continually improve the value we’re offering in our emails to ensure it is relevant to the challenges our decision makers have today, rather than what the challenges were when the email template was written months (or years) ago.
Another way Jim recommends we ensure we measure success is that our communication doesn’t end with an email. Rather, he recommends we make our communication “never-ending.”
To do that, Jim recommends we ask, “How do I ensure my prospects know how much I care about them?”
Only when our prospects understand how much we care about them will they be interested in how our product or service can help them as wel