Good salespeople spend a lot of time crafting personalized, relevant emails. They proofread their messages several times over to make sure there are absolutely no grammatical errors. They insert an interesting statistic at the beginning to grab the recipient's attention, and agonize over the subject line. Finally, they press the send button ... and the buyer immediately hits "delete." All that work, gone in an instant.
If your messages are banished to the spam graveyard more often than you'd like, check out Jeb Blount's post "3 Reasons Your Prospecting Emails Keep Getting Deleted." One of these issues could be to blame for anemic open or response rates.
"According to the Harvard Business Review, the average business executive gets 200+ emails a day. So your prospects cope with being crazy busy and overwhelmed the same way you do: Scan and triage," Blount writes. "In this paradigm, to get opened, your prospecting email must stand out from all of the noise and be compelling enough to entice a click. Sadly, though, most prospecting email scream 'delete me.'"
After you learn how to prevent buyers from pushing that dreadful "delete" key, peruse five more of the week's best sales articles below.
1) Closed -- Now What? by Jonathan Farrington
A salesperson's job isn't done once the contract is signed. Discover what lies beyond the close.
2) The Best Way to Handle the 'I Want to Think About It' Objection by Michael Pedone
Pedone gets to the heart of this pesky objection.
3) The Root Cause of Many Lost Sales Opportunities by Jill Konrath
Alternate title: What Ping Pong Has to do With Sales.
4) The Untapped Power of Sales Discovery Skills by Mike Kunkle
Have a question about the discovery process? This extremely thorough post has the answer.
5) Tell Your Customer No! by Jim Keenan
It's not blasphemy -- it's a survival tactic.
What were your favorite sales posts from this week? Share in the comments.