Most sales people fear the thought of
icy calling so it can frequently help to send a precall letter or
message. We have tried actually many distinctive message
designs--some with long duplicate and some with just 1 sentence. Here
are 5 administers to contemplate when making your precall message
fights:
1. Avoid being self-promotional
You may think the purpose of a pre-call
email is to educate the prospect about your company and services.
It's not. Overly-promotional messages which simply sound like spam
only serve to create anxiety for the prospect. Oftentimes the less
you say about yourself the more a prospect wants to talk to you.
2. Create familiarity in the messages
Instead of telling a prospect about
your company, tell him what you know about his company or industry.
Do you know about a trend or current challenge? Are you working with
similar companies? If so, let him know in the first sentence of your
email.
3. CC everyone involved
Your response rate will be 500% greater
when you email more than one person inside the account. If you're
targeting a CFO, cc other managers who may also be involved in the
decision, such as a COO, CEO or even VP of HR.
4. Send more than one email
Repetition is the key to success in
email marketing and pre-call campaigns. In our testing, the first
email a salesperson sends will achieve an open rate of about 20%.
However, when we follow up with a second email 2 days later, this
email has an open rate of 48%!
5. Have the right call-to-action (CTO)
Are you asking your prospect to
schedule a meeting with you? Visit your website? Request a demo?
There are several different CTOs we could ask for. Generally, you
only want to ask for one. More than this could confuse the prospect.
You'll also want to test various CTOs to see which one generates the
best response. For example, there are times when driving prospects to
an online demo before asking them for an appointment generates a
better response than directly asking them for an appointment in an
email.
