Prospecting is generally one of THE activities salespeople dislike the most (along with reports requested from management 🙂 They find all kinds of ways to avoid making a “live” contact. And Technology (email for example) gives a way out. We can just whip out messages, hit Send and cross prospecting off our To Do list. Yet, does email prospecting work?
It must get some results as there are thousands of companies and people using this approach to gain your attention and asking YOU to call them or schedule an appointment. And some are more effective than others.
Following is a REAL email sent to Alice Kemper, a colleague of mine.
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Hi Alice,
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 XXXX 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,
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Guess what Alice’s response to me was? “Are her fingers broken? Do people really do this through email and have success?” If you notice, the Sincerely is in a different font size so this was not a “custom” message.
What do you think? Can you just zip off a couple of “canned” emails, give instructions to a prospect and expect them to contact you for an appointment? Alice and I don’t think this is an effective approach AND we don’t think it speaks well of how important we are to someone wanting to do business with us. But maybe we are old fashioned.
So, I decided to ask a couple of experts – authors such as Kendra Lee, Ardath Albee, Colleen Francis, Tonya Signa and more – to weigh in on this topic. And I will share their responses over the next few days.
Let’s get the conversation started with your comments – Does email prospecting work for you as a sales pro OR as a consumer? If it does, how and why? If not, why not?
