Hello Experts!
The gloves are off and its time to see what is more profitable – from your perspective. Email prospecting or telephone prospecting? My good friend Nancy Bleeke sent this note around to a few Female Sales Experts and I thought you would love to weigh in on the topic….
“You know how sometimes you get information that causes you to pause and think “Whoa, am I out of touch with a business practice that works?” I received a note today that I thought was great fodder for your expertise…and I will quote your responses in the blog post I am doing on this. If you have a previous blog post or article addressing this, please send the link.
A colleague sent me the following message about asking for an appointment via email with someone you have never made contact with
The email she received!”
Hi A,
I’m following-up on the email I sent you a couple of weeks ago. I’m checking to see if you’ve given consideration to Sales Training Consultants and Callbox working together on setting business appointments for your sales team. If you’d like to talk more about this, just let me know when I should give you a call.
For more about our work with the Business Services industry, click here.
You can also make a direct online inquiry about our services.
Sincerely,
B
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“Don’t ya just love this kind of marketing!! Are her fingers broken? Do people really do this through email and have success? What do you think? Does this approach work? Two emails to set an appointment? Are we being old fashioned? What advice would you give to this woman and company?” – Nancy Bleeke
Response #1 from Kendra Lee:
Yes, email prospecting does work. I write, speak, coach and train on how to do it all the time and get people who tell me what great success they’ve had. However, the approach this person used is inappropriate for a number of reasons. Here are just 3 strikes against her:
- She probably never sent the first email she referenced and the recipient will know that
- There’s nothing that would interest the recipient because it’s all about the seller – no value proposition, triggering event, ROI
- It’s all about clicking to go their site, nothing about talking and learning about the recipient’s needs which a good seller knows is key to selling anything
Response #2 from Tonya
We provide this type of prospecting service for our clients -and I can tell you, if there is a lack of personal engagement (especially in B2B sales) like this is a perfect example of, your results and ROI will be disappointing at best. Pick up the phone and show you care
Tonya Signa, Signature Marketing Services
Response#3 from Molly Cox
As a buyer my first thoughts would be .why isn’t she calling me? Does she have a man voice? Does she talk though a voice box? Okay, seriously tho’, if people can do this more power to them. There is an art to writing a compelling e-mail that would make someone want to go to the next level. I’ll be interested to know if soon we’ll be texting people for sales. Guess I’m an old “build the relationship” kinda gal.
Your responses?I would love to hear what you think! Are you for email prospecting or against it? Do you have proof it works or doesn’t work? Now is your chance to wade in on this topic.
Cheers Colleen
Colleen – engaging debate. As you know, we actively use email in our business, and I love the notion that I could set our emailer on autopilot and then vacation while the responses and orders came rolling in. I have heard the success stories, and I like to think they are true.
For us, email is only one part of our business development and marketing effort. We like to email our clients and prospects regularly with valuable information and offers, with an aim to be useful, and to generate responses. Our response rates are better than average but we don’t expect every recipient to buy or respond. We often do secure meetings via email, but we wouldn’t depend on it alone. For our target accounts we want the email to create conditions that make a call welcomed, but in most cases, we rely heavily on phone-work to get the meeting. Email is usually too passive a medium and doesn’t allow the interaction required for meaningful interaction with a prospect. Email is a critical compliment to our other direct selling activities.
Eliot
http://www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/blog
Eliot,
I think you nailed it. Cold prospecting by email is too passive and not an effective way to build a relationship. Email is a create relationship enhancer especially if the emails you are send are high content and of value to the receiver. I have seen one exception….a client of mine had a very successful cold email prospecting campaign to a very targeted market and routinely saw a 10-11% positive response rate. They were able to replicate this success for over 3 years. – Colleen
[…] Feb 25th I published a debate about whether cold email prospecting works and if so, what were the best and worst practices. Hands […]
Superbly illumnaiting data here, thanks!
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