Greg Bennett Sales Blog

eMailing Alone is NOT Prospecting

Not sure if it's a generational 'thing' or not...but it seems more and more young salespeople entering the workplace believe that sending emails alone (with no phone calls or live visits) constitutes prospecting.  Of course we old vets know...IT DOESN'T.  Email is one of the best things to ever happen to salespeople, it has transformed the amount of work we can get done in a day...but used alone, it falls short of what we need to do in a competitive marketplace to find prospective clients and form long-term relationships.

Here are some things to share with these young sales guns on why email alone usually doesn't work:

• It's Too Impersonal -- no matter how gifted you may be with the written phrase, it conveys just a small part of who we are.  No voice, no eye contact, no body language.  Plus, even though we can read what a client may write back to us, we can't LISTEN at deeper levels to what someone may MEAN beyond their words
• It's Too Easily Ignored -- when email first came out, we'd anxiously open and read the 10 or 20 we may get in a day...we'd see the jokes people would pass around (wasn't that wacky fun for a while)...then exponentially, as more and more people started moving on-line...and spam picked up...we'd be getting 50 and 75 and 200 or more emails a day (about what I get in a normal day).  When salespeople email me I may have time to glance at their message (if they survive the "subject line gauntlet")...if I'm somewhat intrigued I'll shoot a response back, but 9 out of 10 times I'll either erase it, or "save it for later reading" (yeah, right)...
• It Basically Says "I'm Too Afraid to Pick Up the Phone or Stop In" -- now please don't take offense to this, because we ALL (myself included) can catch Call Reluctance now and again, but emailing alone is like sending a big sign over that says..."I'm feeling some Call Reluctance today so I thought I lob one of these over....can you help an old alter boy out?"  ...Like I tell people in sales workshops -- I won't even start to trust or believe in a salesperson until he's left me 3 voice mails...I start to really like him at 5...and he's probably going to win an appointment at 8 (sad side note...only 10% leave more than one voice mail...5% leave 3...and only 1 or 2% go beyond that)...

All that being said, email IS an effective piece of the prospecting puzzle. But it should be used to support other efforts.  Send an email after leaving a message...follow up with email after a pop-in visit...use email to educate, inform and "ground" the prospect in between your phone call and the face-to-face meeting.   

Just don't rely on it alone to get the job done.

GB

Pre-Call Planning Is Critical to a Healthy Sales Pipeline

A 1984 Sales Effectiveness Study by Miller Heiman showed some pretty alarming stats:

• 63.4% of sales managers agree that their teams do not qualify leads as well as they should...
• 55.9% of sales managers agree that their teams waste time pursuing poor sales leads and opportunities

One way to solve some of these issues is in BETTER PRE-CALL PLANNING.  With better qualified leads in our pipeline, we'll close more sales and create more long-term customers.

This speaks to one of the mistakes I find people make within their sales pipeline process -- THEY ALLOW ANYONE WHO CAN WALK UPRIGHT AND FOG A MIRROR INTO THE PIPELINE.  This is caused by:

1. A lack of understanding about what a good prospect looks like -- no client profiling...
2. Call Reluctance -- they'd rather not do any more prospecting than absolutely necessary, so they pretend that who they have prospected is qualified...
3. No Pre-Call Planning

And in today's world there is NO excuse for a lack of pre-call planning. 

Now I know I'm going to age myself here, but when I first started in sales back in the 80's (no, not the EIGHTEEN 80's...who said that?) there wasn't a lot of pre-call planning done because it was just too cumbersome and took too long. 

If you wanted to investigate a company back in the day, you would do things like:

• Call and get the company's annual report mailed to you (yes, using the U.S. Mail, which always took about 3 days back then...can you imagine?  3 Days!!?)
• Go to the library and research the company if you could find them in various directories or old periodicals
• Waste an entire sales call in the discovery process with the client

Of course there was nothing wrong with these concepts...it was all we really had....they just took a lot of time and energy. 

We all know the internet and new technologies have changed this process entirely.  Now a pre-call process could look like:

• Review the research materials your company may have purchased, or the available on-line profiling services that are out there (e.g. Hoovers)...
• Review the company's web-site, where you'll find everything you could ever want to know about where the company has been...where it is now...and where it is going...
• Use search engines to find additional resources and news articles related to the company...

And this can of course now be done in minutes vs days and weeks. 

An important thing to keep in mind is that client's now expect a salesperson to have done many of these things prior to even making an initial call.  That client is just as busy as we are, and they don't have the time to waste helping a salesperson in the discovery process, or dealing with a seller of a product that doesn't fit any of their needs.

If you'd like to read up a bit on this subject, I'm going to make this White Paper available to you here from the fine folks at Hoovers...some interesting info:

Download precall_planning_white_paper_1.pdf

GB