Master your Sales Pitch with a Simple Email16Nov
I’ve never heard someone who’s excellent at business development complain about email. Not once.
Why?
Because they know that emails just simply mirror real life conversations. There’s actually very little difference between these 2 modes of communication and if you’ve mastered one, you’ll be able to do well at the other.
So let’s get down to the fundamentals of how to make sales communication work for you, whether it be through email or in-person.
There are 2 things you need to do to improve your game.
- Research
- More research
- Presenting your research in a digestible way
To be successful at communicating, you must be incredibly prepared. The time you spend talking should be spent presenting fact based research specific to your audience’s interest; their company’s highest risk for not using your product and the highest reward possible for using your product. This should only take you two minutes or less. Here are the components for a successful in person meeting:
- Icebreaker usually from a mutual contact / introduce yourself and what you do
- Ask if you have 2 minutes for a question
- Ask questions that show you’ve done ROI and fact based research on their company’s challenges
- You’ll know if you’ve done the previous step right if you can explain what your solution does, how it solves your prospect’s biggest challenges, and the biggest rewards your prospect is looking to achieve.
- You ask for what you’re looking for.
In the movie “Wedding Crashers”, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn crash weddings in the hopes of finding a mate for the evening. So what do they do to establish a line of credibility and trust with dads, grandmas and others at the wedding? Research. They quickly name-drop a distant relative and a few minor details about them to bypass a defense mechanism and gain instant credibility. Albeit on the slimiest premise possible, but the point of drawing an analogy to this is that your most successful emails will sound like the most successful in person conversations.
Your research should be credible and impressive to show that you appreciate the recipient. Give them the impression you took the time to understand their business and always present it in the form of fact based empirical data.
Is this information extremely difficult to find? Yes. Very difficult. It’s also difficult for the guys at the top but they don’t complain about it. In fact, they plan on most people complaining about it, that’s how they are able to maintain their advantage.
Here’s how to structure the email when you do find it:
10 Comments
What Sales Productivity Looks like with Gmail and Salesforce | Ecquire
[...] to learn how to write an email that works? Check here and [...]
Jesse M
Paul,
Great article, I think that having credibility through an introduction really makes the difference between a warm conversation and the cliche sales pitch. In your potential meeting time links, is that timetrade or a similar app that you’re using? Also, in your links you list Tuesday, Friday, Wednesday, is the Wednesday the following week after Friday? It’s unclear to me because the dates aren’t mentioned.
20 Feb 2013 04:02 pm (@Twitter)
James Doman
The example email you provide could also be improved by using the correct spelling for you’re (p2,l5)
03 Mar 2013 05:03 pm (@@jamesmdoman)
Paul DeJoe
Thanks, James
03 Mar 2013 07:03 pm
Corey Dilley
Paul,
Great article. I’m in the middle of writing a sales email to a list of leads right now and was looking for some inspiration. This did the trick.
Have you found a more effective approach for mass emails, since the personalized intro and research don’t translate so well when talking to a group?
Thanks,
Corey
03 Mar 2013 07:03 pm (@@CoreyDilley)
Paul DeJoe
I was fortunate enough to meet the founder of Bonnaroo and we got to spend some time together over a weekend. He's also a very accomplished music producer as well. I'm not sure you'd call us good friends and/or that I signed up for an email list of his. When I got an email from him about his newest artist that I should check out, the subject line and salutation were this respectively:
Hello / About Trixie Whitley
Hello friends, colleagues, co-conspirators, raconteurs, malcontents, angels, and demons "
The call to action was simple: Go check out Trixie's show in NYC. Obviously, Ashley doesn't have time to write 20K emails. None of us do. And everyone on that email list new it was a large list and they were not getting an individual email. But if you're creative and genuine and respectful or even funny, you can get away with sending an email out to a large group. Where people get in trouble is when they don't respect the recipient's intelligence or time and abuse how easy it is to send thousands of emails at once.
04 Mar 2013 04:03 am (@Twitter)
Anthony
Great idea to go to the extra mile with the meeting invites. How did you go about creating those in GMail?
05 Mar 2013 11:03 pm (@Twitter)
Paul DeJoe
Hey Anthony - thanks for commenting. I've gotten a few requests about that but those are not clickable links actually. While it's not quite what you're looking for, check out boomerangcalendar.com. It will help you cut out a few steps in proposing times.
06 Mar 2013 12:03 am
Anthony
Thanks for the tip. Also, does Ecquire support Zoho CRM?
06 Mar 2013 12:03 am (@Twitter)
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