Email overload is an epidemic in the workplace. Most salespeople that we poll tell us that they spend up to 40% of their day just managing email correspondence between clients and internal partners. If this sounds about right for you as well, let me put things in perspective. If you continue this trend throughout 2015 and work 5 days a week, you will spend 104 days next year in your email inbox. Imagine the number of sales you will be missing out on!
It’s time to re-align your mindset. Email does not close business for you. You close sales based on your personal relationships. Stop working so hard behind your computer and go meet customers in person, or pick up the phone and call them.
In order to increase productivity (and sales) you must learn to manage your email inbox. <– Click To Tweet
Here are 5 tips for staying on top of your emails:
1. Keep It Simple
Send fewer emails out and you will receive fewer emails coming in. Yes, it’s that simple.
2. Get to The Point
Write shorter messages that are very specific and have a clear call to action. Unless absolutely necessary, make sure your email does not require scrolling.
3. Email Only During Designated Times
Answer emails only at specific times of the day. Turn off or close your inbox during prime selling time, and only respond to messages during your set designated periods. You will find many issues will resolve themselves during the day, leaving you with less to handle directly. Don’t worry about missing sales, in my many years of selling I have never seen a company lose a sale because the sales rep waited a few hours to return an email.
4. The Newer, The Better
Read your newest messages first. This is especially helpful on email threads. If you read the newest ones first, you will see whether messages have be responded to by others, reducing the number of messages that you must handle yourself.
5. What’s The Subject?
Create strong, descriptive subject lines. Weak subject lines confuse people and make emails more difficult to locate in the future. Use one word categories such as “request” or “confirmation” along with any relevant information such as times, dates and locations. You’ll add context and clarity for yourself and the recipient.
Finally, remember to stop, think and then send. You want to make sure that what you are sending is timely, topical and targeted. The last thing you want to be accused of is pushing out a lot of your own “email junk” that other people have to spend time managing!
Want more tips and strategies to create sales success in 2015? Get a copy of my new book, Nonstop Sales Boom.
Love what you said about email brevity. We ran a test recently testing a long email overview against a short overview with a link to the overview document. We had 62% higher follow-up rate with the shorter email.
Using our own email attachment tracking tool, we then tracked who opened the attachment and how much time they spent reading. We followed up based on who spent the most time reading the overview, which helped our reps focus only on people interested instead of wasting their time with uninterested leads who may or may not have read a long email overview. Here’s the brief overview we used in case anyone is curious (also, conveniently, explains this free tool we offer –> http://doclib.docalytics.com/v/docalytics-for-sales-platform-overview )
Though admittedly biased, this ‘productivity hack’ is changing the way we sell and keeping leads moving much more quickly through our pipeline.
[…] Manage Your Emails! – This works, unless you have a service expectation with clients. […]
[…] I have put together an entire blog post about this one topic. But, it’s so vital for time management that it deserves to be outlined […]