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!

Prospecting

There is nothing more difficult in any salesperson's life than prospecting. We hate it.

Let me throw out some ideas that might make prospecting easier:

• Decide on the purpose of your prospecting call (be it phone, email, or face to face).
• Is it to get an appointment? If so then aim for that and nothing else. Once you get your appointment say thank you and excuse yourself. Do not sell your product. You have achieved your goal.
• Do your research. Spending 10 minutes on the Web learning about your prospect, his company, and his background will make it so much easier to get that appointment. Read the local newspapers and industry specific publications.
• Be smart about prospecting: Phone calls are just one way of getting an appointment. Use social websites: LinkedIn is an excellent way to get to meet the people with whom you want to do business. Consider Facebook. Send short, sharp, appropriate, personalized emails.

It's all about working smarter and not harder.