You know I’m passionate about email prospecting. It’s one of my favorite prospecting methods, and highly effective when done correctly. Lately, though, I’ve been turned off by a trend I’m seeing from sellers in email prospecting: pretending they’ve already contacted their prospects.

Here’s part of an email I received last week:

I sent you an email a few weeks ago about…
…I look forward to hearing back from you.
Best regards, Jack Samuels

The reality is, I’d never heard of this person. It’s possible he sent an email several weeks ago, but his name isn’t familiar. Neither is the company name. I simply don’t remember.

And neither do your prospects.

That’s the objective with this type of email. The seller wants the prospect to think he missed responding to a previous email, so now has to reply to this one. There’s no forwarded email to remind the prospect what you’d written “a few weeks ago.” It’s left up to your prospect’s memory.

It’s a guilt tactic. And it’s deceptive.

But if it gets a response, isn’t that all we care about?   No!

You’re selling yourself short.

Here you are trying to sell the true value of your solutions and the value you bring as a consultative sales person. You’ve done your homework and know how you could help this prospect. You’ve probably got some great ideas to share and have a genuine reason to speak with him.

So why don’t you use this great information in your first email to make a powerful impression?

In my experience, sellers who pretend that they’ve already contacted a prospect aren’t really trying to be deceptive. Rather, they aren’t sure how to open their prospecting email to initiate a conversation.

Get the conversation going with a first sentence that makes a prospect want to respond not out of guilt, but because you have something of value to say. Consider these two things:

1. What do you know about the prospect?

It could be a business issue you suspect the prospect has from your research. It may be information you’ve read about the company, such as an impending move, award or recent hiring. Or, it could be a trigger event such as a change in state regulations, the impending flood or hurricane season, or a trend in their industry.

This is the ideal opening for your first prospecting email because it relates directly to your prospect.

2. What ideas can you share?

You know a great deal from work you’ve done with similar companies and prospecting is the perfect opportunity to leverage it. In your email, suggest that you have a conversation about an idea you’d like to share related to the opening of the email.

Now you can create a grabber first sentence like one of these:

Congratulations on your outstanding success! I saw your award as one of the Top Places to Work in Kansas City.

With the economy strengthening in our area, it’s becoming more important to run your business as efficiently as possible to meet growth objectives.

Many community colleges in Washington are moving to an online course model to increase enrollment with rural students.

Pretending is not necessary. Your value is obvious from the first sentence of your email and your prospects will want to respond and talk with you. Use your real value proposition and a genuine approach and you’ll see your email response rates soar.

I just had a conversation with one of our clients who is successfully scheduling appointments based on a lead generation email campaign he created after attending one of our virtual training programs.  Sounds great, doesn’t it?  But there’s a catch.  The appointments aren’t producing much in terms of sales. 

You might think the problem is that the email campaign is attracting the wrong kind of prospects, but that’s not the case. 

I believe the problem is that the client’s sales cycle is too short. 

It’s an issue we see with many of our clients.  In their haste to close a sale, they try to gather all the information needed to write a proposal in just one meeting.  Then they send the proposal and try to close ...without much success, I might add. 

This “one-and-done” approach is ineffective for a variety of reasons, particularly in high-stakes sales, as is the case with this client who sells IT services. 

Think about it.  Would you allow a company access to your computer systems after just one conversation?  Unlikely!  And the same holds true for selling many other solutions. 

You need to take time to build rapport with your prospects, to earn their trust.  That just doesn’t happen in one conversation. 

What typically happens, instead, is this.  You...

• Overwhelm the prospect with too much information.
• Take more of his or her time than planned.
• End the meeting with little rapport, or worse, an irritated prospect.

What’s more, when you try to close too quickly, before earning the prospect’s trust, it generally becomes a price game – and that’s a hard one to win consistently.  On the flip side, if a prospect trusts you to solve his or her problem, price is often a non-issue. 

My advice to this client, and to you, if you’re having a similar problem, is to stretch out the sales cycle by creating reasons for more than one meeting.  You might try some or all of these ideas...

• Use two or three meetings to gather background information and understand needs.
• Set up a meeting to review the proposal with the prospect. Don’t just send it. Go through it together in detail.
• Schedule a proposal follow-up meeting to answer any lingering questions, which would be another time to try and close the opportunity.
• Email the prospect between meetings to remain top-of-mind and continue building a relationship. You can simply remind the prospect about your next appointment or you might include an article, customer success story or other useful content related to his or her issue.

It may go against your instincts to slow down, but doing so may actually get you to ROI faster.  Not only is it likely to increase your win rate, it may actually speed up the sales cycle because you make it easier for your prospects to say “yes,” when you’ve earned their trust.

You probably know that all too often sales training fails, for a variety of reasons. The good news is that there are ways to make your investment of time and money in training pay off!

I’m very pleased to share that RainToday has generously agreed to share their brand new report on why sales training fails with our community at no cost. The report explains just what you need to do to make your sales training successful.

“Why Sales Training Fails” is a great new resource whether you’re engaged in a training initiative now, planning a new one or just want to improve your sales results. You may know that we partner with RAIN Group on its RainToday.com website -- and I believe this high-quality report really can help you improve your sales results.

Here are more details and a link to download your copy of the report.