The first thing I learned on my first day as a salesperson was that you do not sell over email. I think this is worth stopping to talk about because I get between 50 to 100 cold emails and DMs per day, and almost none of those salespeople ever pick up the phone to call me.
I don’t recall what else the sales trainer said about selling over email, but I think we can all agree that email is not a perfect standalone sales tool for a few different reasons:
Difficult to Build Interest
It can be difficult to build interest over email because you have less time and attention to work with. You can share a couple of details and points, but that is typically not enough to completely sell the prospect on your product or service.
Messages Might Not Be Seen or Read
When you send cold emails, there is a good chance they’re not being seen or read. Even if your email is not being filtered to the SPAM or junk folder, you may still have emails that are being deleted without being read.
Close is Not As Effective
Closing over email will never be as effective as closing when you are talking to someone. Not only is there less pressure for the prospect to agree to move forward, but you have much fewer options for what you can say and ask when you close.
What is the Recommendation?
We are not recommending that you replace email with a call or call every prospect you send an email to. The recommendation is to view your sales and marketing tool sas a bag of golf clubs. Each club serves its own purpose by hitting the ball a different distance with a different level of accuracy.
The phone and making calls are like your putter. The putter does not hit the ball very far at all, but it is extremely accurate and needed to get the ball into the hole.
In the same way that you would never play a round of golf without a putter, you should never have a sales strategy that does not include ever picking up the phone. You can use other sales and marketing tools to generate and nurture leads. And then augment that with very targeted phone calls.
The Key is Who You Call
One way to do this is to use email automation and email marketing tools to deliver your message to a large audience. This would be like using your iron to hit the ball a long distance. Then use data from the email software to see who is opening emails and clicking on links in your emails.
You can put these prospects at the top of your list of people to call because they are engaging with your email messages and appear to be warmed up. This would be equivalent to pulling the putter out once the ball has been hit onto the green and using the phone to close the prospect and put the ball in the hole.
