Sales Prospecting Perspectives

I’m often surprised by how many awkward phrases, spelling mistakes and grammar blunders I see on the Internet. Renowned blogs and magazines post content that I have to stop reading halfway through because doing so is frankly painful. Sometimes, I receive sales emails so replete with grammar inaccuracy that I delete them before finishing them. I definitely don't reply to them. If you're a sales prospector or marketer, this is certainly not the reaction you want readers to have to your content. 

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Christine Rochelle, Integrated Marketing Manager at lotus823.

Each and every work week at lotus823 is kicked off by a roundtable staff meeting and of course plenty of Diet Coke to go around.

Once our co-founder David Hernandez is able to bring the buzz of the room down, he walks us through each of our current business development opportunities for the agency.

Instead of jumping to discussing brand strategy or services, David always gears the conversation into a discussion about our personal relationship with the potential client contacts and what they would like to accomplish for their team and for the brand.

You get them in your inbox. I get them in my inbox. Sometimes our email has the intuition to deflect them to our spam folder.  In many cases, they’re from people you don’t know or from a company you’ve never heard of, and they’re long – unnecessarily long.  They are trying to market and sell something, but do you really care to even read a word of it?  These are the so-called “canned emails,” “spam mail” or “junk mail” – however you define it.

Recently, it seems that everywhere I look I come across more and more instances of customer service, and it makes me realize how crucial customer experience is when it comes to retaining business. Unfortunately, customer success sometimes gets overlooked because time seems better spent on the obvious – running the operational day-to-day tasks of an organization. Just recently I took on the responsibility of customer success at our organization, and I have been thinking a lot about what the key components are to driving customer care for inside sales.

I’ll admit it. I think I have been avoiding the usage of collaboration tools for a number of years now. No matter how hard my boss has pushed it, I just couldn’t get myself to fully adopt the tools he was presenting. I would test it out for a few weeks and then would stop because I wasn’t recognizing the true value.  You may have been in the same boat as me. I just kept using the excuse, “I have my email to manage that.” After recently realizing that comments like this make me feel old and stuck in my ways, I started giving it more thought, and decided to jump on the bandwagon to give it a shot.

And when I did, something great happened.

It’s Monday morning. You sit in your chair and elbow over a stack of papers in order to reach your keyboard. You open your email and check if your prospects have responded yet. If they don’t answer in a week, you’re just not going to contact them again. You think you might have a call scheduled today, but you aren’t sure what time. Maybe your prospect will just call you. Your thoughts are scrambled between big projects – meeting with the sales team to follow up on passed leads or working on a new script – and small projects – leaving 15-second voicemails and filing papers. It’s been 15 minutes, and just thinking about the work you have to do in the next 8 hours is making you stressed. 

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Craig Wortmann, founder and CEO of Sales Engine.

“First we make our habits and then our habits make us.” – Anonymous

All of us have habits which lead to routines.  Once in awhile, it’s good to stop and recognize the routines that are running our lives. As professionals, salespeople are as susceptible as anyone to bad habits.  

Here are 5 things that we should all stop doing:

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Chris Snell, Inside Sales Manager at Care.com

Can I let you in on a little dark secret of mine?

Promise not to tell anyone?

Here it is:  I’m not that great at getting responses to my prospecting emails.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from James Hutto, co-founder of Valeo Marketing.

In an ideal world, we’d all have 100% email open rates. After all, they signed up, so they want to see what we have to say, right? If only things were that simple... Even if you’ve crafted the perfect squeeze page, written amazing content, and gently encouraged your readers to sign up via email... It’s all for nothing if they don’t read those emails. What must be done next—and arguably just as difficult, might I add—is to write subject lines that get your subscribers to actually open your emails. But don’t fret! With the right approach, you can craft email subject lines that will leave your readers hungry to discover what’s inside.

Back in October, I attended a friend’s wedding and was on the outskirts of the dance floor sipping a drink deciding whether I felt mindless enough to mingle with some strangers.  Out of pure procrastination, I caught sight of an acquaintance’s husband standing nearby. He reminded me of Christian Bale’s character from American Psycho so naturally I went over to introduce myself and literally within 5 minutes I had somehow divulged that not only did I sell my house but I made a profit as well. His eyes nearly rolled over white like a shark during an attack as he went into his role at a venture capital firm and how he’s raising funds for a promising startup “golf” channel. The whole time he talked, I stood back making sure my drinking glass was in a position to block a viscous assault on my jugular; he was going for blood with his sales pitch. I savored my drink by consuming it slowly; I was going to need every drop for this interaction.