You must be saying… these guys are crazy -  If I keep on e-mailing to my contacts, my e-mails will just be so much more “junk” coming into their inbox. That can’t help me or my business.

The simple answer is… don’t send junk !  Send something of value. If you send something of value, you can e-mail often.

The leads and prospects you are mailing have two common characteristics.

1.    They are all in business and are looking for specific kinds of information that can make their business more efficient and profitable.
2.    At one time they touched your business or service because they were interested in what you have to offer.

These leads and prospects are your e-mail market. They may not be ready to buy from you today but one day they will be ready. You can magnetize this market by using e-mail to reintroduce your product in a consistent and automated way. In addition, you can become recognized as a knowledgeable industry insider and trusted advisor by giving away industry information and useful tips and tools that are of value to all people doing business today.

By following this simple plan –Most of your leads and prospects will look forward to seeing an e-mail from you or your company in their in-box. They may not open every one you send – that’s ok. You just want them to come to trust that your emails will offer something valuable in exchange for a few minutes of their time. Then when they are ready to buy the type of product or service you offer from some vendor, you will be “ top of mind”.

Of course, there are a few of your contacts that won’t like what you send and they will opt out. That doesn’t matter. The fact is, it’s good news!  The people who stay on your list and accept your e-mails are interested in what you have to say.

When building a sequence of e-mails to send to your list of contacts, remember this is not going to be a series of sales pitches. Don’t slam folks with the features and benefits of your product or service. That’s a guaranteed way to make them look at the From: field and start groaning, and then cut you off.

The sequence (e-mail campaign) should contain industry updates, links to white papers or reports, links to relevant social networks, new articles, links to interesting software, and any tips and techniques that you have perfected to help your customers or even your own business. The last sentence or two and the signature line should be the only reference to your company and/or product. All this free content for your e-mails is relatively easy to find. A few hours of internet research can provide enough detail for an entire campaign.

Now, as you are sending this campaign, you should be using the same From Field in the e-mail address and a Subject Line that reflects what you are sending. That establishes consistency and credibility. The recipient knows when they get an e-mail with your Name or Company Name in the  From Field, it is going to be worth the time to open and read.

In addition, while a “cleaver” Subject Line like “there she was without all her clothes” or “I am so very sad” will get a lot of opens one time – you are going to make a lot of folks very angry ( also not CAN-SPAM compliant ). They will not be looking forward to your next e-mail and will opt out. It is better to be accurate with Subject Lines even if they are not funny or exciting. Again, you are establishing a pattern and creating credibility.

Here are some simple ground rules to follow when creating your email campaign:

Don’t…
Send out last year’s corporate brochure
Go on and on for several pages
Talk about your “unbelievably low prices”
Talk about yourself or your company
Expect to close the sale in a single message

Do…
Keep it short
Get to the point
Talk about your customer and their challenges and objectives
Include a “call to action”

So where do you find valuable information to send to your customers?  It can seem like a tall order.  The answers will be different for every business and every industry.  A good way to get an idea of what information your customers value is to get involved in the trade associations your customers are members of.  Check out their websites.  What “news” are they highlighting?  These trade associations may even be willing to let you copy their “news” if you give them credit in your email.

An email linking to a web page with the latest rankings of companies in your industry can be an easy answer.

There are numerous article publishing sites.  You can browse their selection, find articles that would be of interest and email your customers a link to an interesting article.  Many of these sites are happy to let you “re-publish” their articles as long as you follow a few simple guidelines that they’ll spell out for you.  Here’s are a couple of sites to start with – http://ezinearticles.com and http://clickbank.com.  Of course, the Wall Street Journal, Money Magazine, Forbes and other business publications all have great information on their web sites.  Your email just needs to point to an article on these sites that your audience would find interesting.

Here’s the good part, when you do have something to announce about your product or service, the fact that you have established credibility with your list of recipients allows you to go ahead and send it.   Again… be honest and straight forward.  And don’t do this too often.  Now that you’ve given value, you have the right to say something like:

_________________________________________________________________________
Hello Joe,

I’m glad you are enjoying the e-mail series ( newsletter) you have been receiving.
We’ll ( Your Name, Brand, Company Name)  want you to know, we have a lot more interesting  free (industry information, tools software, whatever )  that we’ll be sending in the coming months.

But frankly, this e-mail is a shameless attempt to sell you something. It’s one of products you may have seen before but we recently released and update.

Very Brief Pitch with Link to your product capture page for a demo or whatever

Thanks etc

Look for our next  e-mail about _____________ ( not your product)
________________________________________________________________________________

That’s all there is to it. It’s not very hard.  The only other piece to get this e-mail process moving is an effective way to stay on top of your campaign schedule and keep the emails going out.  Of course, a good CRM/Contact Management System that will automate, schedule, send, and follow up easily is a good idea.

Remember, delivering value means you can send e-mail often.

In our next chapter/installment of “Email Marketing – The Only Bailout Your Business Needs”, we’re going to dig into nurturing new leads or prospects using email marketing. register to receive the entire eBook here

“Lead Nurturing – Automate It and Sell More” will appear here at Sell, Sell, Sell! on June 8.  In fact, each installment will be appearing here every Monday throughout June.  So stay tuned!

Special thanks for contributing to this installment go to Steven Greene.  Steven’s written and managed lead generation and nurturing campaigns in industries from banking to boating.  His input on email marketing is invaluable.  To learn more about Steven click here.

Related posts:

1. Free e-Book – Email Marketing – The Only Bailout Your Business Needs
2. Won’t They Think I’m Spamming?
3. Email Marketing – The Only Bailout Your Business Needs

Your paying expense bills for lunches, meetings, flights and hotel rooms. Its the cost of doing business right?

How many of the clients you’re spending all that time and money on are buying anything? Not enough right?

Your artillery is firing at any target they can find. There is no other way is there? Yes there is!

In the last installment of our "Double Your Sales in 2009", we covered how timing your presentations and proposals so that they’re not wasted on the wrong prospects can increase your close rate and boost your bottom line.  Click here to read "Timing is Everything".

The idea is simple. Qualify the prospect agressively early in the process. Then conserve your sales resources for the prospects that have a real shot of buying. But its a big switch. Most sales people use presentations and proposals as their initial hook. Of course putting those presentations together and coordinating the meetings is where most of their time goes.

If qualifying is about figuring out how the customer will cost justify your solution, then if you don’t have the answer yet, how do you decide what the best next step is?

What if you start by asking yourself what’s in it for you? I don’t mean the obvious size of the potential deal. I mean what do you get out of the next step? That’s the counterintuitive part. We’re talking about selling something here. You don’t get paid until the deal is closed. So, its not always clear how to quantify the return on the interim steps in the sales process. No one’s going to pay you to show up and give a presentation.

The classic sales advice is "ABC – Always Be Closing". But in a complex sale with several steps in the buying process, you’re always happy to dish out the next step in the process just so that you can get closer to the closing step.

If your sales process is demo, needs analysis, proposal and close, then first of all, it should be needs analysis, demo, proposal and close (see Double Your Sales in 2009 installments 1 and 2). When you’re finishing up the needs analysis, you first decide if their needs justify your solution, then you ask yourself what the prospect can do to ensure that your demo has the desired effect. What’s that desired effect? THEY ask YOU for a proposal!

So what does your client need to do for YOU to be sure that the upcoming demo is a home run? In the case of a demo, they need to be sure that all the right players are there and they need to tell you what they need to see.

Each Step is an Agreement

What if you "close" on an agreement with the prospect that all these things will take place? Better yet, what if as a part of your needs analysis, you determine what their "must have" requirements are? What if when you’re scheduling the demo you ask the prospect, "If during the demo I’m able to show you that our solution meets all your primary requirements, will you allow me to present a proposal directly to the CEO?"

In other words, there should be a quid pro quo for every step in the process. You do something for me and I’ll do something for you. If not, then you’re just the chaser. You’re begging them to keep dancing with you without any guarantee that they’re going to leave with you.

So each next step in the process has a reality check – Is the prospect willing to invest in the next step themselves? Are they investing their own time, political capital, money, information, etc. that equals the investment you’re making in that next step.

It can seem daunting to decide what the appropriate "investment" by the prospect is. A good place to start is to imagine the ideal prospect. The one that needs what you have to offer and is the absolute perfect fit for your company. This prospect wants your solution more than you want to close them. What would they do at each step in the process? They’re in a hurry to buy from you but, they have to follow their standard process. They’re going to try and help you. They’ll offer to get the decision makers and influencers together for a demo. They’ll offer all the cost information about what not having your solution is doing to their bottom line. These are the kind of things that you want to ask of each prospect.

So they ask you if you can do a demo for the marketing department and you ask yourself, "hmm, what would make that worthwhile? The CEO won’t be there so no decision can be made. What can the marketing department do to help you?" Perhaps you ask them if the marketing department would be willing to share the details of their current advertising spending and return on that spending. That’s the key information that you need in order to show the CEO that its a no brainer! That would make your hour long demo well worth it!

Sales people are negotiators by nature. So they’ll naturally take to this type of give and take.

• Take the list of things you do for prospects that take time and money.
• Then make a list of things your prospects can do for you to make the process easy and show themselves to be highly qualified and likely to buy.
• Now pair the two lists.

The Law of Attraction

The tough part is to resist the temptation to say "YES" immediately when a prospect asks you to do the next thing in your process. Work on saying "Well, I may but, would you do THIS for me?" Clearly, that’s going to be a big change.

What makes this approach difficult is precisely what makes it so powerful! Prospects are not used to hearing no or maybe from sales people. When you respond to their requests with questions about what they’re willing to do in turn for you, it completely sets you apart from your competition. It creates the impression that you’re someone who values their time. That makes you attractive to them!

Up next in our "Double Your Sales in 2009" series – "How to hold your sales team accountable with out running them off ".  It’ll be available here on February 16.  Don’t forget to register to receive the entire "Double Your Sales in 2009" series as an e-Book here.

Related posts:

1. Time is Everything – Double Your Sales in 2009 Part 2
2. Qualify Early and Often – Part 1 of 5 from “Double Your Sales in 2009″
3. “Double Your Sales in 2009″ Begins Monday January 23!

Qualify Early and Often, Part 1 of Double Your Sales in 2009

• How not knowing the difference between a lead and a qualified prospect is costing you big bucks!
• Free up days and days for your sales team to focus on their best prospects and clients.
• Improve your bottom line immediately!

Your sales people’s time is valuable.  You’ve probably have hired sales assistants to take paper work and other stuff off your sales staff’s plate.  Because you want to help them focus their time on what?  Selling of course!  Working with customers, whether on the phone or in person, is where you want their time spent.

But its not that simple.  If you’re in the food service business and I gave you a list of Realtors to call on, would you want your sales reps spending their time on the phone and meeting with those Realtors?  Of course not.

To really super charge your sales performance, you have to take a close look at WHO your team is spending their time on.  Don’t worry, this is not a sales pitch for changing your lead generation.  This is much simpler than that.

The fact is that virtually every sales person spends too much time on leads that are not at all likely to purchase.  They just don’t know how to tell the difference.

Qualifying leads is not a new concept.  You’ve probably already spent a lot of time preaching to your team about it.  But can you say that your team is good at qualifying leads?  How many of your proposals go know where?  How many of the face to face presentations your team gives lead to a long series of put-offs and no sale?

Why does this matter?  Because just like you wouldn’t want your sales team wasting time with paper work and administrative tasks, you also don’t want to waste their valuable selling time on leads that aren’t going to buy!  The key is to know the difference – QUALIFYING.

If you qualify well, or better said, qualify accurately and do it up front, as a first step in your sales process, then you can minimize the time your team spends on leads that won’t buy and maximize the time they spend on leads that will.

So first let’s consider how big an impact better qualifying could have on your business first.  Here are a few questions you’ll need to know the answer to:

• What are the crucial steps in the sales process?  Examples – Set appointment, presentation, proposal, close
• How much time is typically spent on each step?
• How many new leads or prospects does each rep typically go through this process with in a given period (week, month, quarter..)?
• How many of them buy?

If you don’t have this information, ask your team to start making a list of every presentation, proposal, etc. that they do for about twice the length of your typical sales cycle.  Then just crunch the numbers.

Here’s an example: 
Let’s say a sales person typically works with 50 new leads each month and each decent lead typically gets a 30 minute phone call, a one hour presentation and a proposal that requires 30 minutes to create.  Add to that all the calls and emails that go into coordinating meeting times and following up, trying to close and you’re easily up to 3 hours per lead or 150 hours per month.  We’ll assume that you have a 20 % overall close rate so, that means 10 out of 50 leads buy.  So it takes 15 (150 divided by 10) hours of sales time to get a purchase.

So, 80% of the folks that your team spends all this time on don’t buy.  That’s 40 leads getting 3 hours each or 120 hours of sales time spent on leads for no return, every month.  What if you just started asking the right questions up front and decided not to go on appointments until you get the right answers or at least to hold off on the presentation and proposal?  Imagine that you could filter out 20% of the leads up front with a solid, simple series of questions that you use as the "bar" that leads have to get over before they "earn" your sales team’s expensive time?

Now, 20% of 50 leads is 10 leads x 3 hours amounts to 30 hours freed up each month!  That’s almost a week of each sales person’s time!  Obviously that’s significant.  It lowers the time spent per sale from 15 hours to 12 hours.  That can’t help but improve your bottom line!

We’ll focus on this specifically later in our "Double Your Sales in 2009" series but, clearly the real win is in what your sales team does with this freed up time.

But first, how can we teach your existing team to ask the right questions up front and refrain from delivering time consuming and expensive presentations and proposals to leads that don’t past the test?  The good news is that its not really that hard to do.  The hard part is being consistent.  Its easy to "fall in love" with a lead.  They have a way of telling you what you want to hear.  Its up to you to hold your team accountable.  When they fall in love with the wrong leads, it costs you and them money.

Here’s how we do it:
We decide upon a set of questions that must be asked of every lead and the answers that are "qualified answers".
Some are obvious like "Are you the decision maker?", etc.   In fact that is the most important and most often neglected question.  Its easy to excuse the sales team.  They’ll say "We can’t get in to see the CEO initially.  We have to start with someone else and earn their trust so that they’ll help us get the CEO’s attention.  Maybe so but, a staff engineer is not the decision maker.  If you haven’t spoken with the decision maker, then there are many things you should be very careful about delivering during the sales process.

One way to identify these questions is to look at your customers.  What do they have in common?  Maybe they’re in a certain industry or region.  Maybe they’re of a certain size.  Maybe they all shared a similar challenge when they purchased from your business.  When I talk to clients, I like to ask them "What are the 5 or 10 questions you ask every new lead?".

Once you’ve identified the questions, you’ll need to work on responding to the lead’s questions and requests when they aren’t giving you the answers you want.  Develop low cost, simple ways for your team to give the lead a data sheet or brochure or price list that answers most of their questions.  Most importantly, you’ll need to teach your sales team to say NO.  The lead thinks she’s qualified.  She’s going to ask "Can you send me a proposal?", "Can you come in for a demonstration?" and you’ll need to break some bad habits.  Most sales people see it as their role to please the customer.  Its tough for them to say no.

Of course, there are "softer" ways to say no.  The best thing you can say is something like "Before I waste your time on a presentation, I’d like to find out more about your needs to be sure we’re going to be able to help."  Most importantly, you’ll need a strategy to respond to these requests from leads that aren’t decision makers.  "Who will make the final decision on this purchase?", "Before I waste your time on a presentation, can we arrange to meet with the CEO to understand their needs?", etc.

There will be a period of trying things, learning and adjusting but, if you start trying, you’ll get better and better at it.  The absolute most important step is to hold everyone accountable.  Ask sales reps about the presentations and proposals they produced recently and ask them the qualifying questions.  When they don’t have the right answers, tell them so.  Keep a record of business trips, presentations, proposals, etc. done by each rep and sit down with them and decide which were really qualified and which weren’t.  Remember, we’re talking about freeing up 1/4, 1/3, maybe even 1/2 of their time to focus on closing the best prospects and finding more prospects like them.  This is in everyone’s best interest.

As I write this I realize it probably doesn’t sound simple or easy.  I think its like taking the training wheels off your bike when you were a kid, once you get the hang of it, you can’t believe you didn’t try it sooner.

Up next in our "Double Your Sales in 2009" series is "How to Time Your Sales Efforts So Leads and Prospects Get What They Need".  It’ll be available here on February 1.  Don’t forget to register to receive the entire "Double Your Sales in 2009" series as an e-Book here.

Related posts:

1. “Double Your Sales in 2009″ Begins Monday January 23!
2. “Double Your Sales in 2009″ Begins Monday January 23!
3. The most common reason sales are lost

I’ve tried to encourage her to use various time management and organization techniques and systems in her Real Estate business over the years with almost zero success.  Its just not her style.  Its her style I love, not her organizational proficiency…

In these moments of gentle suggestions or outright brow beating, I’ve become educated as to why and how some people resist “getting organized”.

Its just not their style.  If you’re even mildly successful at what you do, then you don’t want to mess with a good thing.

If you’re in sales and you make hand written notes on business cards, napkins, scraps of paper and your hand, it may be working for you.

So when someone says you ought to get a contact database going, you see a bunch of keypunch work and a change in your methods.  Both inspire discomfort, fear, sweating, fidgeting and occasionally a “Hell No!”

When your friends, colleagues, boss or spouse encourage you to get your client list into some sort of database system, the benefits they extoll are usually things like scheduling call reminders so you don’t forget a follow up call or an appointment, keeping notes about key clients and even things like using the list for email blasts and direct mail campaigns.

In today’s totally connected world, these things are more valuable than ever.  You’re computer can’t help you connect with someone that’s not in your computer.

But here’s the nugget my lovely wife has taught me…

Your “style” of doing what you do is part of the very essence of you.  If you’re not the keypunch, organize it type, then your strengths probably have much more to do with your people skills.  People LIKE you.  That’s your biggest asset.  No way you would want to mess with that.  If you start killing yourself typing names into a computer, you might not be quite the happy, jovial, friendly person you are today.

But all this still comes back to a foundational truism of sales…  Greater success lies in maximizing the time you spend interacting with prospects and clients.  If your people skills are your strength, then its even “truer”.

Then there’s also the way success begets success.  Its true on a macro scale.  Close your first really big deal and somehow more big and bigger deals seem to start showing up.  Its also true on a day to day basis.  When you have a good promising call that gets your juices flowing, you’re going to be totally glowing on your next call.

So, all this is what I think makes using a contact management system so cool for EVERY sales person.  Instead of spending several minutes between each call shuffling through papers, cards and notes to figure out who to call or what you need for the call, anyone can get their call list into Outlook or any “real” contact management system and get into what I like to call “Smile and Dial” mode.

By having all the contact information (phone, title, email, etc.), and just maybe some notes or detail fields about each client, in your contact management system and your call reminders all queued up in a “Task List”, you don’t have to search for info before each call.

The result is you minimize the time between dials and between actual conversations.  This let’s you stay in “on mode”.  Its like when you’re at a party and every-one’s attention seems to be focused on you.  You turn on your charm naturally.

So you dial the phone and leave a message, then dial again and talk to a secretary who tells you when to call back, then dial again and get a prospect on the phone and have a constructive conversation, then leave a couple more messages within a minute or two, then get another prospect on the phone and you’re still buzzing from the first call.  And this builds and builds.

Plus the fact you’re knocking out your follow up calls in an hour or two where they currently take half the day and seem sort of like a distraction or hassle in themselves.  They’re not a hassle or distraction and shouldn’t feel that way.  They’re the most important part of your sales pipeline.

More calls means more business.  More enthusiasm and “on-ness” in those calls means a LOT more business.

OK, that’s enough.  My wife’s getting that look!

To see how to get into Smile and Dial mode, join us any Wednesday at 2pm EST here.

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