Increase Sales Productivity and Captivate Prospects
Email may not seem like an ideal communications medium when it comes to increasing sales productivity and captivating prospects. It is, however, how most sellers and buyers communicate today. More than likely your reps rely on emails as a follow-up to phone conversations and to communicate throughout the sales cycle.
Because email follow-up, while necessary, takes away from valuable selling time, it’s important to have an email process in place that is time efficient and still effective. To be effective, the content in a follow-up email needs to captivate your prospects.
It should provide pertinent, concise information and include relevant attachments and/or links that will peak interest and invoke action.
Instead of investing the time needed to create this type of email, many salespeople resort to sending quick emails that tend to leave a prospect under-whelmed.
Using pre-configured templates is an excellent way to follow up with captivating emails while preserving selling time. A short-cut your reps might take is to use past emails as a boiler plate of sorts. Making use of sent emails as the basis for a new email is relatively easy. Unfortunately, it requires unnecessary time to locate the appropriate email and it is fraught with risk (like leaving in the past recipients name).
The most effective approach is to take the necessary time up front to create email templates (with attachments and links as needed) tailored for every stage of the sales process that triggers email follow-up. To further ensure the email your reps send have impact, you may want to customize each of the stage-based templates to the type of industry or job title (or both) of the email recipient.
Below is a tool to help you determine which templates to create. We’ve included example sales stage triggers however you’ll want to customize them to fit your own sales process.
Table: Customer Type (Vertical Mkt/Title )
| Sales Stager/Trigger | Type 1 | Type 2 | Type 3 | Type 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Lead 1st contact Attempt |
||||
| Prospect Expressed Interest | ||||
| Prospect Interested No Near-term Oppt’ | ||||
| Repeated Attempts | ||||
| Prospect Agreement on Need | ||||
| Presentation | ||||
| Negotiation | ||||
| Close |
Once you’ve created your templates, it’s important that they are convenient to access and use so reps don’t waste time searching for the right content. This functionality is built-in to Incite2. Incite2 allows you to create different email (and voicemail) templates that reps then access with drop-down menus right from within Salesforce CRM. They simply select the category of template, modify to create a personal touch and press send. It is that easy.
In a fiercely competitive market, it is imperative that your reps captivate prospects with each communication. Timely communication is not enough. Email messages must be relevant and specific to the specific audience in order to have an impact. You can increase sales productivity and captivate prospects if your reps have the right tools. Using email templates to communicate with the greatest impact is a good place to start.
