4 Tips to Get a Better Response to Your Cold Emails

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

People often ask me how to improve their response rates to their email outreach. In this month’s guest post from Jonathan Allen, Jonathan shares 4 tips to ratchet up those prospect engagement scores. Jonathan is SaaS strategist and SalesLoft content specialist. Enjoy his post and please pass it on to everyone you know who sells something!

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How do you improve the response rate of your cold emails?

Considering that fewer than 24% of sales emails are opened, and only a small portion of these receive a response, it can be easy to assume that email simply doesn’t work for contacting prospects. But this isn’t the case. There are a plethora of businesses landing clients on a regular basis – purely through email.

The problem is not with the medium, but with the message.

So how do you set yourself apart? How do you develop a cold email strategy that delivers results, time and time again?

Although cold emails are still more of an art form than a science, there are specific steps you can take to improve the outcome of your outreach emails. Try using these 4 tips to get a better response to your cold emails.

1. Focus on the buyer’s needs

This may seem obvious, but you will be amazed at how many cold emails revolve around the sales rep’s need for a sale rather than the prospect’s need to solve a problem.

Cold emails are not advertisements featuring your latest products or deals, they’re an opportunity to connect with the buyer and present yourself as a viable partner capable of assisting them with one of the many challenges they currently face.

So take a moment to ask yourself what type of problems your buyer is facing, and then develop your email from this perspective. Share industry advice and tips, mention challenges that the industry is currently facing, and offer to provide free insights or advice if needed.

By making a simple effort to focus your email around the buyer’s needs, not only will you increase response rates, but those who respond will be sincerely interested in interacting with you and your organization.

2. Personalize each email

It doesn’t take much effort to make an email feel personal – even if it’s not 100% unique.

Instead of sending out the same generic email to every individual, from every organization, across every industry, find ways to personalize your emails so that each recipient feels recognized as an individual.

An easy way to do this is to integrate a tool like SalesLoft’s email tracking – which allows you to segmentize your audience and monitor responses. Rather than send the same email to everyone, set unique content for each industry, company, or other criteria that you establish.

By spending a few minutes to ensure that the individual’s name, company, job title, and other elements are in place, your cold emails will maintain an individualistic feel without consuming a substantial amount of time.

3. Include multiple types of media in your emails

An email doesn’t need to consist solely of a few lines of text. Instead, add additional value to the recipient by including other elements that make it personal, beneficial, and impactful.

What type of content can you include in your cold emails?

Any type!

Because people buy from people and not computers, consider making your cold emails warmer with a personalized video. Introduce yourself, your organization, and how you hope to benefit buyers. Not only will a video capture people’s attention, but it also gives you a face – immediately making the relationship more personal.

Meanwhile, consider including white papers, infographics, or reports that may offer additional value to your prospects. I’m not talking about promotional content that discusses your product – I mean practical and applicable content that will benefit the reader even if they don’t buy from you. You should certainly use this content to raise additional awareness of your company – but make it 100% focused on adding value to the buyer. This will substantially increase the response rate of your cold emails.

4. Track open rates and clicks – and A/B test everything

With the analytics available today, you should be constantly tracking and monitoring your open rates, clicks, and everything inbetween.

Experiment with titles, text, media, and other elements of your cold emails to discover the perfect concoction that maximizes your response rates. It’s amazing how just a slight adjustment to an email title can impact open rates! Meanwhile, tweaking the call-to-action can increase click-thru’s substantially.

Once you discover the best strategies for your cold email campaigns, take the best practices and A/B test to build upon them even further. When you discover a new best practice, integrate that into your future campaigns while continuing to A/B test additional elements.

Over time, you’ll develop the optimal cold email campaign for your organization and industry.

Conclusion

By integrating the tips above into your cold email outreach, not only will you discover a higher engagement rate with prospects, but you’ll develop a sales strategy that truly provides value to your buyers and the industries you support.

This will help establish your organization as a market thought leader – increasing your sales and developing a higher level of respect within the industries you operate.

About the Author

Jonathan Allen is a SaaS strategist and SalesLoft content specialist.
He has extensive experience in sales development, account management, and B2B strategy.

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Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn

Sales Messaging and the Sales Experience

By Barbara Giamanco 3 Comments

“The greatest inhibitor to sales effectiveness is the inability to communicate a value message.” – SiriusDecisions

Sales organizations make huge investments in hiring salespeople, getting them upskilled and productive quickly, implementing sales enablement and technology solutions, but when it comes to focusing on the quality of activities that create the sales experience from the very first touch point onward, there is a gap. A pretty big one. I’m talking about the sales message that is delivered either through email or phone calls.

Automation has made it easy to crank out large numbers of emails each day, and often this is where salespeople start when they are pursuing their target list of buyers. Probably for a very obvious reason. Someone ignoring your email feels less like personal rejection than when making the phone calls. Still, most sales leaders tend to have a KPI (key performance indicator) that measures the number of phone calls made, in addition to the number of emails sent. And, I’ll just say right now that I think the focus on these two measurements as sales performance indicators is off base. Here’s why.

What does it matter if I call 100 people each day if this activity doesn’t result in a higher percentage of booked sales meetings? The answer is pretty simple. It doesn’t make sense.

If you are a salesperson who knows your sales performance is largely measured on calls made and emails sent, you’ll likely do whatever you have to do to hit those numbers. You may have checked the KPI boxes, but what you end up with is a lot of activity that wasn’t very effective.

On Dave Kurlan’s Blog, Understanding the Sales Force, I read a recent post of his that makes it clear that salespeople are having a difficult time bypassing gatekeepers and getting to the decision makers. His research indicates that when salespeople do not begin with procurement, they can only get through the gatekeepers to decision makers 13% of the time. But Dave filtered his research data even further to focus on salespeople brand new to sales and that percentage drops to 1%. Though it isn’t the subject of today’s post, ponder for a moment that many of the salespeople hired for Sales Development or Business Development Roles are brand new to selling. They are expected to reach decision-makers and set up the appointment for the account executive, but they get through to the targeted person 1% of the time.

When salespeople are making all those dials and sending all those emails, why aren’t sales leaders evaluating more carefully when the activity isn’t converting to actual sales conversations. Though I don’t have hard research data to back it up, my observations suggest that what happens is that sales reps are just asked to do more. Doing more of the same, however, isn’t going to lead to a better outcome. In Cracking the Sales Management Code, authors Jason Jordon and Michelle Vazzana tell us that “success is no longer found in making enough sales calls to reach your quota. That is a trial and error marathon that you may or may not win. Success is now found in making the right sales calls to achieve the right Sales Objectives to reach your quota – a quicker and more predictable path to the winner’s circle.”

The big problem isn’t the activity itself. Instead, it is the quality of the activity. Poorly conceived subject lines. Messages that do not contain an ounce of value for the target buyer. Messages that include gimmicks to get attention. Sales emails and phone calls more often than not are sender oriented, and usually, include a mix of look how great we are and a laundry list of features. Survey after survey confirms that buyers say these messages do not engage them. Rather than standing out, the salesperson’s message goes in the delete pile with everyone else’s. But, the cycle of poorly constructed sales messaging rages on.

Throughout the course of the sales experience lifecycle, many things can go wrong but if you can’t even get on first base, where do you go? What salespeople say in the first interaction with a potential buyer is critical to moving from touch to sales conversation. Maybe it’s time to stop wasting the opportunity!

Tech Talk: What I Like This Week

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

I admit it; I’m a tech geek. No, I don’t do the coding thing, but I can navigate my way around most technology platforms pretty quickly. Tinkering and learning what makes things tick is in my blood. I give credit to my dad for that one. He was the fixer upper type and prided himself on getting his hands dirty.

Lucky for me, I serendipitously fell into a career selling technology solutions, and I absolutely loved it. Today, it is no accident that I work with sales teams to teach them the fine art of social selling. Given that buyers are harder to reach, all sellers today must integrate relationship building activities that lead to sales opportunities through the power of social channels. Fight it all you want, but this is the world we live in today. It is a mashup of online AND offline sales activities that start you on the path to closed deals. However, online activities may get you in the door, and what really counts is what happens when you get there.

So, in the spirit of loving technology and how it can benefit all of us in sales, here are my 3 pics for this week.

Vidyard

I believe the use of video in selling is still a largely untapped market. I know I’m more likely to pay attention to a short, focused video that engages me with something relevant that I care about versus reading another boring email. Notice I said “engages me” not “pitches me”.

I was introduced to Karl Ortmanns by Eric Mitchell. Eric had mentioned Vidyard during the weekly @SocialHangout, which is a lively Google Hangout/Tweet chat that he hosts along with Kevin Thomas Tully and Jack Kosakowski. Karl and I had the chance to talk last week and he walked me through their platform. Impressive. Sending someone a video is one thing, but how do you know if and when they watched it? Vidyard shows you how viewers interact with your videos. This means you can continuously improve your engagement strategy based on measurable results. Salespeople using Salesforce as their CRM, are able to see the video’s each of their contact watches from within the CRM and can track how long the prospect paid attention. With detailed viewer analytics and engagement data, sellers will know when the time is right to suggest a sales meeting. Vidyard offers solutions for marketing, sales and corporate communications.

InigoApp

Another great app that I heard about from Eric, Kevin Thomas and Jack, and this one is not going to make printers happy. This app completely does away with the notion of printing and carrying business cards. And, how many times have you found yourself in a situation where you didn’t have a business card to hand out? It’s happened to me.

Available for iOS and Android and soon for Windows phones, InigoApp changes up the way you think about business cards. With the app, I easily created and customized a cool business card that I can share on the spot with someone I meet through email and text, and I can also share my card with my various social channels if I care to. With all the ways that someone can connect with you made incredibly easy, there is a much higher likelihood that they will. With one click, someone can easily follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, drop me an email or call me. Brilliant!

Yesware

Email isn’t going away anytime soon, and sending email to prospective buyers is still a strategy used by thousands and thousands of salespeople. The challenge is in knowing if the email is not only getting to the person intended, but you need to know if anyone actually opened it.

Imagine being able to time your follow up based on knowing when your prospect opened your message, the attachment you sent; i.e. proposal, clicked on a link or viewed your presentation. You can also leverage email templates that other sales team members may have created that are being opened more often. Yesware works with Outlook and Gmail and integrates with Salesforce.

If you want to learn more, you can visit the Yesware website, or reach out to Dakota McKenzie and tell him I sent you! By the way, Dakota was paying attention online when Yesware was mentioned in a sales tweet chat I participated in last week. Seeing that I had in interest in learning more about the platform, he connected with me. That’s how it’s done peeps!

No Christopher Here

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

“Telemarketing and fancy email marketing campaigns yield disappointing results.”

Yes, because the sales message sucks. Just like the one you sent to me.

If I am tired of this kind of cheese, you know that other busy Sales Executives and Business Owners are too. You would welcome the opportunity to learn more about my sales process?

First, I’m not Christopher and Christopher has never worked here.

Second, I’m not available to waste my time educating you about my business.

Third, you assume that the people you are emailing struggle to find prospects.

Four, if you really “care” – take time to do your homework and tailor your message.

Five, the email is a pitch, and I don’t care that you are “excited” to share how you help others.

To all sellers, sales leaders and marketers…

Differentiation from the competition is a common sales goal, and it isn’t that hard to do. Guess what…don’t send messages like this one. Guaranteed, you will stand out! Why? Because it is RARE to receive a cold email that adds value or is compelling enough for buyers to want to know more.

PLEASE don’t send emails like this one.

“Hi Christopher,

Most business owners and sales people struggle to find prospects. Telemarketing and fancy email marketing campaigns yield disappointing results. I’m excited to share how I’m helping others have a constant stream of prospects with XYZ’s automated prospecting technology; the return on investment is typically less than 3 months. I provide sales expertise and can help in other areas too.

Benefits:
• 30%+ Response rates (personal & relevant content with multiple touches, totally automated & managed)

• Steady Stream of prospects=$ MORE SALES$

• Fewer missed opportunities: our clients are at the “Top of their prospects minds”

•Personal and professional attention from a sales professional with over 20 years of B2B sales success, I care.

I would welcome the opportunity to learn more about your sales process and share with how I can help add drive more revenue.. Do you have any availability for a brief call in the next few weeks?

Sincerely,
XYZ
Chief Salesologist”

What's the Purpose?

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

A simple question, I thought. I was wrong. I made a mistake. I apologized.
Mistakes happen. It is inevitable. How you handle the gaffe, I believe, is what makes the difference between winners and losers.
Passionately believing in doing right by others, I’m pained to know that someone had a business experience with me today that was anything but wow. And the unfortunate irony is that I had just finished an article for the October issue of Top Sales World. The topic focused on customer experience and the importance of considering what the experience is like for people who will interact with you and your employees – sales, marketing, service, finance, HR, operations – on behalf of your company brand.
Here’s how I screwed up.
I use a scheduling tool called TimeTrade. Hours of wasted time and hassle when scheduling meetings are mostly a thing of the past. When I agree to meet with someone, I simply send them a link to my calendar. They find an opening that works for us both and book the time. My calendar is automatically updated and all is right with the world. That is until it isn’t.
As a general rule, I do not share the calendar link publicly. A few months back though, the link was included at the bottom of a newsletter with a little blurb that said if you’d like to have a conversation about our social selling services you can use the link to book a meeting. What ensued was some temporary chaos. More than one sales person used that as an opportunity to book time on my calendar. Their objective wasn’t to learn about our services however. Their goal was to try and sell me on theirs. The lack of integrity some sales people display still surprises me.
I learned from that lesson, and honestly, it has been about 5 months since it happened. I had forgotten all about it.
Which leads me to my goof…
Looking at my calendar this morning, I notice that I am scheduled to have a meeting with someone I do not recognize at all. Not a personal contact, we are not connected on LinkedIn, and I do not recall ever meeting the individual. Then again, I meet thousands of people each year and there are thousands more in our database and my social networks. I see so many examples of what sellers should not do that I think my judgment was clouded. And the message in the schedule confirmation seemed suspicious. Perhaps a classic example of seeing what you expect to see.
What to do?
I didn’t want to be a jerk, but I didn’t want to waste my time either. Been there, done that. I sent a message to the person and asked them to clarify for me the purpose of the call. Without thinking, I went on to say that I typically know the people that I am meeting with.
I offended.
In the moment, asking for clarity about the call’s purpose made sense. After all, it did not say that the meeting was to discuss social selling services. But that is irrelevant. Forgetting that we were the ones who sent the public link in the first place was certainly my first mistake. I compounded my mistake when I assumed that this individual’s intentions were less than honorable. As a result, I did not think more carefully about the words I used, nor did I consider what the question would feel like to the person reading my message.
When you screw up, offer a sincere apology. And, offer to make it right. I did both. We will see what happens.

What’s the Purpose?

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

A simple question, I thought. I was wrong. I made a mistake. I apologized.

Mistakes happen. It is inevitable. How you handle the gaffe, I believe, is what makes the difference between winners and losers.

Passionately believing in doing right by others, I’m pained to know that someone had a business experience with me today that was anything but wow. And the unfortunate irony is that I had just finished an article for the October issue of Top Sales World. The topic focused on customer experience and the importance of considering what the experience is like for people who will interact with you and your employees – sales, marketing, service, finance, HR, operations – on behalf of your company brand.

Here’s how I screwed up.

I use a scheduling tool called TimeTrade. Hours of wasted time and hassle when scheduling meetings are mostly a thing of the past. When I agree to meet with someone, I simply send them a link to my calendar. They find an opening that works for us both and book the time. My calendar is automatically updated and all is right with the world. That is until it isn’t.

As a general rule, I do not share the calendar link publicly. A few months back though, the link was included at the bottom of a newsletter with a little blurb that said if you’d like to have a conversation about our social selling services you can use the link to book a meeting. What ensued was some temporary chaos. More than one sales person used that as an opportunity to book time on my calendar. Their objective wasn’t to learn about our services however. Their goal was to try and sell me on theirs. The lack of integrity some sales people display still surprises me.

I learned from that lesson, and honestly, it has been about 5 months since it happened. I had forgotten all about it.

Which leads me to my goof…

Looking at my calendar this morning, I notice that I am scheduled to have a meeting with someone I do not recognize at all. Not a personal contact, we are not connected on LinkedIn, and I do not recall ever meeting the individual. Then again, I meet thousands of people each year and there are thousands more in our database and my social networks. I see so many examples of what sellers should not do that I think my judgment was clouded. And the message in the schedule confirmation seemed suspicious. Perhaps a classic example of seeing what you expect to see.

What to do?

I didn’t want to be a jerk, but I didn’t want to waste my time either. Been there, done that. I sent a message to the person and asked them to clarify for me the purpose of the call. Without thinking, I went on to say that I typically know the people that I am meeting with.

I offended.

In the moment, asking for clarity about the call’s purpose made sense. After all, it did not say that the meeting was to discuss social selling services. But that is irrelevant. Forgetting that we were the ones who sent the public link in the first place was certainly my first mistake. I compounded my mistake when I assumed that this individual’s intentions were less than honorable. As a result, I did not think more carefully about the words I used, nor did I consider what the question would feel like to the person reading my message.

When you screw up, offer a sincere apology. And, offer to make it right. I did both. We will see what happens.

Are You an Email Addict?

By Barbara Giamanco 2 Comments

It is a rhetorical question. I already know the answer. You are. I was too.

Recently, I conducted some serious soul searching regarding my own productivity. I’m an idea person and the list of things I’d really like to do is usually long. The problem I was faced with though was that I wasn’t executing on most of them. Other projects I was working on seemed to take much longer than necessary. I wanted to find out why.

What did I do? I studied my habits. I looked closely at where I was spending my time every day. What I discovered, although it wasn’t a shocking surprise, was that I was being sucked into email and ending up stuck there off and on throughout the workday.

You know exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t you?

Here is how it would go. I’d clear emails and then realize I’d better get started writing that blog post, preparing my material for the next client program or making those sales calls needed to bring in revenue. I’d be making great strides and then bam…that urge to check email. I’ve read various reports that say that once you do that, it can take as long as 20 minutes to get yourself back into the groove again and pick up where you left off. Maybe you never even get back to where you were.

Email addiction is a big problem and it is costly in more ways than one. This obsessive compulsion to be always “on” is robbing people of their productivity, the opportunity to be present with friends and family and the opportunity to enjoy life without constantly stressing out about what they think they might be missing.

In April 2010, Tony Schwartz of the Energy Project posted a poll on Huffington Post about workplace experience. A question about email was included. Here’s what they found out:

“Out of 1200 respondents, some 60 percent said they spend less than two waking hours a day completely disconnected from email. Twenty percent spend less than a half hour disconnected.”

Less than half an hour of your waking time disconnected? Seriously, that’s sad.

I love what Brendon Burchard has to say about email. He says, “Beware of your inbox, it’s nothing but a convenient organizing system for other people’s agendas.” That really stuck with me and two weeks ago, I made a decision.

No email before 12 noon each day. The only exception I make is if I have meetings scheduled, I will “scan” to see if meeting times have been changed. Even if they have, I do not respond before 12 noon.

My new habit is working. In addition to completing client work and bringing in new business, I have:

Completed an e-book
Finished my Sales Meets Social Media training course and facilitator program
Recorded an audio series
Recorded several new videos
Written blog posts
Begun my plans to create an interview series of top sales pro’s

If you are reading my post, I’m going to ask you to challenge yourself to set boundaries with respect to email. After all, whose agenda is more important – yours or theirs?

Give Me A Reason Not to Ignore You

By Barbara Giamanco 3 Comments

An interesting topic surfaced on Facebook today, which I then turned into a LinkedIn discussion. At issue was whether or not business people should get back to people with a yes or no answer, but not ignore the contact altogether. A number of folks chimed in with their thoughts about why a “good business person” who knows how to “build relationships” would always respond. Of course, I don’t agree given that I’m on the receiving end of some of the dumbest sales pitches and requests for my time ever. Usually, it is about what they want – their agenda. They aren’t thinking about me and my needs.

As it turns out, the original post was suggesting that someone who’d connected with you and asked that you follow up with them, but never responded again was at the heart of the dialog. But it also got me thinking about how many times I’ve heard sales people complain that they don’t receive call backs or responses to their emails.

Here are 5 reasons why ignore or delete may be the first thing someone does when they receive your message.

Your message has no compelling value for the person that you are calling. I am sooo tired of the rambling speeches about how your product is the best; you can save me money, yada yada yada. I don’t care about your canned sales pitch.What’s in it for Barb and her business? Do you really know enough about my business to be able to catch my attention? Most of the time, you haven’t taken the time, so the answer is no.
We can’t understand a word you have said in your voicemail. At this point in someone’s business life, it should be obvious that your ability to speak clearly and articulately is critical if you expect anyone to respond to your message. If you have an accent, then you will need to work even harder to ensure that you speak slowly and clearly enough for someone to understand you. Remember that the communication success largely depends on how you present yourself.
Lack of information. I received a call yesterday from Shawn. I have no idea who Shawn is but all she said is…”Barbara, this is Shawn. Call me at XYZ number.” Seriously, no last name, no company name, no message about why I would actually pick up the phone and call you back? If it is important that someone get back to you – tell them why doing so holds value for them. If you happen to get someone on the phone…same holds true. Identify yourself clearly by giving your first name, last name, company name and why you are calling. I don’t have the time to waste dragging the information out of you.
We have no relationship. I prefer to work with people that I know, or people that I’ve been introduced to by colleagues. I have zero patience with the standard, boring, uncreative cold call tactics most sales people insist on using. I’m willing to listen IF you give me a good reason to do so. If your first email communication is a sales pitch and I don’t know you, the chances are high that I will merely hit delete. Though occasionally you might get lucky. Last week, I received an email from someone I didn’t know but they said something intriguing about lead gen and how their products helped you mine LinkedIn information. That got me curious. I’ve set up the demo.
You sell competing products/services to mine. Forgive me if I rant for a second here, but geez, do your homework. One memorable cold call was the gal who sold behavior assessments (I do too!) who said that she realized I sold competing products and then proceeded to leave me a lengthy – something like 8.5 minutes – message about why her assessment was better. Now, it isn’t that I wouldn’t be inclined to consider adding another product to our offering, but after that message…forget it. I refer you back to point #1.

Here’s the deal. Everyone is busy. Just because you have something to sell doesn’t mean that we want or need it. Remember that successful selling isn’t about you and your agenda. You have to expertly communicate the value you bring to the business relationship and and the results you deliver. Otherwise, you are just wasting everyone’s time.

The Accidental Spammer

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

One of my pet peeves is receiving broadcast emails from people who neglect to use the “bcc” line in their communication, thus leaving all email addresses exposed to everyone else on the list.

If you are going to use standard email versus a program for email marketing like Constant Contact then please hear me when I tell you that you leave the window wide open for that unscrupulous someone who will push out a sales pitch to people that YOU know, but THEY don’t. Well…until you gave out everyone’s email address that is.

This happened to me earlier this week.

The email was an announcement about a business endeavor a friend had recently put together, and I was glad to receive the information. Unfortunately, he used email for the message and put everyone on his list in the “to” line exposing all of us to potential spam.

And you guessed it…minutes later, David – who needs a few netiquette lessons – “replied all” to the message and tried to sell us his interviewing products. Sending unsolicited sales propaganda without securing permission while trashing my friend’s network at the same time is really tacky. The guy lacks an integrity gene in my opinion, and I would NEVER buy from anyone like that. And the worse part is that he didn’t care one iota about how it might affect my friend’s reputation. All he cared about was himself!

Tips to avoid this happening to you…

Unless you are positive that everyone on that list knows each other – use BCC (blind carbon copy) to hide the information.

Use an email marketing system like Constant Contact. Not only does it resolve the thorny issue of exposing your network accidentally, but email marketing systems are designed to handle the opt-out stuff required by law.

Communicate your spam policy to you network. Let them know that you are not giving them permission to sell to your network and that if they do they become “persona non grata”.

Always remember that your “network” is a precious asset that must be protected. Make sure that you do!

1. Focus on the buyer’s needs

2. Personalize each email

3. Include multiple types of media in your emails

4. Track open rates and clicks – and A/B test everything

Conclusion

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