The Prospecting Email

Get it right and effective email prospecting can help you can significantly increase your lead generation hit rate.

Some pointers:

• Decide on the purpose of your email:

1) to get an appointment?
2) to keep in touch with a prospect?
3) to make a prospect aware that a competitor has bought your solution (so they better get their act together). You cannot build a house without first having sketched out what you are going to build.

remember: emails do not sell a product.

• understand you target audience:
• in certain geographies people only respond well to short, sharp, factual emails. Other geographies respond differently.
• individuals at certain levels within the company hierarchy will respond differently to unsolicited emails: a "C" level individual only has attention time for a couple of lines whilst an IT person may well read a longer email. If you do not know then find out (ask other salespeople). Don't drone on and shoot off all your product benefits bullets in one email - you will hopefully have plenty of time for that at your face to face meeting.
• research the target audience individuals (so do not send the same email content to everyone within the company: different people are interested in different touch points of your offering)
• make it personal; don't send "ads" they could as easily see in a newspaper
• make it appropriate: exactly how does your product help their particular industry at this particular point in time
• Most importantly, refer to 2-3 success stories: companies that have bought your solution. Briefly describe how they have benefited through its implementation and usage. Nothing sells a product better than a reference. But keep it short and to the point.
• Finally, before sending, put yourself in the receiver's company role and frame of mind (as best you can), and ask yourself how he would react to your email - then ammend accordingly.
• CHECK THE SPELLING!