Small Sales Technique / How to sell via Email ?

Your initial goal is to open a dialog-- not to sell yourself, your firm, or your products.

Based upon the sample "sales emails" that people have been sending , there seems to be a general misunderstand the basic concept of selling via email, which is that the initial goal is only to open a dialog.

How to Do It Wrong

The other day, a reader asked how write a Subject line that would not get caught by a SPAM filter.  He'd been sending out emails to "thousands" of prospects and hadn't gotten a single response, so he assumed the emails were getting filtered out.

Rather than answering tthis question, Have a look at this "sales email."  It consisted of several paragraphs of densely-worded gobbledegook, followed by a request for an hour-long meeting and a "contact me to set up a time" request.

It was immediately obvious to me that the problem wasn't SPAM filters, but instead the barrage of verbiage contained in the email.

I asked how the sales person ended up with such a monstrosity.  Turns out that the "sales email" had been crafted by a sales training firm :-) and was intended to--get this--"answer the customer's objections before they brought them up."

Now, let's list out all the tasks that this "sales email" was supposed to accomplish:

1.   Convince the prospect to commit to a minute of mental effort to decipher what the heck the email was all about.

2.   Educate the prospect about the product and its features and functions, while simultaneously answering any objections to buying.

3.   Convince the prospect to allocate an hour of his or her valuable time to meet with a salesperson.

4.   Convince the prospect to either find out more about the product (by clicking on the website) or take a specific action to set up the meeting.

How to Do It Right

The sales approach described above is not unusual; I've seen dozens of sample "sales emails" that are equally baroque and demanding.

For reasons I don't quite understand, people expect a "sales email" to do their selling for them, even to the point of closing the deal and getting the customer to take action.

I suspect that this confusion is a hold-over from the old direct marketing days. After all, if you're sending junk mail, you've got one shot (the "piece") which must interest the customer enough to contact you.

But email doesn't work that way.  The strength of email is that messages can flow back and forth without both people being present at the same time.  Email not a way to send junk mail electronically; it's a way to start and have a conversation.

Your initial email doesn't have to convince the prospect to take any action other than just hit REPLY and thereby indicate an interest in learning a bit more. You can (and should) wait until subsequent emails to explain details or request a meeting.

Since your goal is to open a dialog (rather than sell something), your initial sales email should simply contain a teaser (not content free, but certainly not a word parade) with a suggestion that the prospect REPLY to learn more.

If you get a reply, you know that the prospect is at least minimally interested in what you're offering.  More importantly, you're now in a dialog where you can explain more, add value, and gradually move the sale to the next level.

Note: Please share your views/thoughts and leave a message with your comments/suggestions   as they are always welcomed.  This will keep me motivated and will encourage me to write and post more useful articles based on various topics mostly related to Technology and HRM.