Sales is tough fir virtually anyone, but particularly challenging for smaller business and soloprenuers. A more detailed look at what is challenging about sales could be conversions, hitting quotas, retention, qualifying, or any of the numerous other tasks you’re juggling throughout the day.
Did you know that prospecting is named as the biggest challenge by 42& of salespeople? Closing and lead qualification follow at 36% and 22%, respectively. Maintaining a steady flow of prospects into your sales funnel is a necessity, but it’s frustrating and time consuming.
However, as we all know, the more prospects you produce, the better able you are to hit the quota and reach revenue goals. Which makes sense.
It’s easier said than done.
Prospecting used to be a numbers game. You’d get a list of names and telephone numbers, call them all in order and hope that some would be interested in whatever it was you were selling. It worked for a long time.
But we’re now in the age of caller ID, do-not-call lists, and voicemail. Calling a list of numbers doesn’t work anymore.
Emails is now the bat way to prospect, connect, and engage.
- 73% of millennials cite email as their preferred channel for business communication.
- 64% of decision-makers read email.
- Automation and personalization are the two most widely-used email marketing techniques.
- Email is the top channel for both customer acquisition and retention.
How can you improve an already-stellar sales channel? Try these tips and tricks for sales email prospecting.
1. Prioritize It
Using email for your sales prospecting is one thing. Prioritizing it is something entirely different.
To truly get the most out of it, you need to treat prospecting just as important as your monthly sales goals. You need to schedule it daily and set concrete, achievable prospecting goals.
Prioritize prospecting as you do sales. You can even incentivize prospecting as you do sales (contests, leaderboards, etc.) Track, monitor, and manage prospecting as you likely already do for sales.
One without the other is only half as successful as you could be.
2. Build Your List
The digital revolution has made building your email prospecting list easier than ever before:
- Ask for referrals from existing and past customers. Research shows that at least 83% of customers are willing to give a referral after a positive experience. 92% trust referrals from people they know. Always ask for referrals.
- Use a list building tool like ContactOut to find potential leads based on keywords, location, job titles, and so on.
- Names but no address? Try VoilaNorbert to find anyone’s email address.
3. Enrich Your List
Don’t believe that a built list is a done list.
Names and a few other details are not enough. You need to research the companies and individuals on your list before contacting. Do it manually, or tools like ContactOut will help you build and enrich your list.
Build your list. Enrich your list. Scrub your list.
Make sure you have the necessary details to give a personalized experience.
4. Template It
A great thing about email prospecting is the ease in which you can scale up your efforts by using a template.
Craft a powerful, engaging first-contact template using merge tags or fields to automatically personalize while reaching more prospects than you could with a manual approach.
Automation doesn’t mean impersonal.
Try out a few email formulas to find which works best with your target. Sprinkle in personalized details collected during your research and enrichment phase.
Send it out to your polished, scrubbed list.
5. Get Personal
Personalize emails as much as possible. No one has time for an email that’s clearly a blast sent out to thousands.
Personalize your subject line. 33% of people decide to open an email based on the subject line, and personalized subjects are about 25% more likely to be opened..
Personalize your opening line. Personalize a bit in your main body. But don’t over-personalize and become creepy. 2-3 genuine and relevant personalizations are better than 5-10 superficial ones.
A personalized email improves your click-through rates by 14%, and your conversion rates by 10%, while segmented campaigns see 39% higher open rates, 24% better deliverability, and 18x more revenue than broadcast emails.
6. Keep It Simple – Only One CTA
Every email you send should have one tangible call-to-action. What do you want your recipient to do? Have you made it ridiculously easy for them to do it?
Be clear. Be bold. Be compelling.
7. Automation
Automate, but not too much and not all the time. Automation should be used in the beginning to reach out and make initial contact.
You should personally engage once your prospects are warmed and primed.
So automate up to a point, then personally engage.
8. Follow Up
Follow up. Follow up. Follow up.
- 92% of salespeople give up after four ‘no’s’, but 80% of prospects say ‘no’ four times before they say ‘yes’.
- It’s been found that 70% of email chains stop after just one unanswered message, another 19% after two, and a further 7% after three. However, the studies find an average reply rate of 30% on the first message, 21% on the second, 13% on the fifth, and 7% on the tenth.
Let’s Talk About Your Brand
shane@3catslabs.com | Call +65-3159-4231
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