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Want to know how to get more sales the easy way? Everyone says that email is the way to go. But there is a problem. Most of the advice out there is geared towards marketers and not traditional sales operatives. In fact, most email sending platforms aren’t very friendly to sales people, and some are downright hostile.
The good news is that you too can leverage email to boost the number of booked sales calls, meetings and closed deals, even if you come from a traditional sales background. In fact, there are a couple of easy secrets to make it happen, and I’m about to share all of them with you, right here, today.
1) Pick a Sales-Friendly Platform
At Emercury we pride ourselves on working closely with sales teams across different industries to find out exactly what you need to get more out of email.
This is the reason why we are continually releasing more features to help book more sales calls and meetings and produce more sales.
For one, we make it easy to integrate with all of your sales tools. You can do this through the custom “integrate anything you can imagine” option. But also through building deep integrations into the platform itself, such as our Calendly integration.
And the best part? Emercury supports cold emailing. This is almost unheard of with email platforms, most of whom do not support cold-emails in any way, shape or form. But if you’re doing sales and getting lists of cold leads to contact, you need this.
Fortunately, we can work with you to help you import your lists of cold leads into the system. And, we will work with you to understand exactly how to go about warming them up, which is crucial to being able to convert them to sales calls and conversions.
But why just read about all of this? Book a free-demo while I still have time for those and I can show you one-on-one how you can leverage email to get more sales.
2) Understand where sales comes into the big picture
It’s kind of hard to distinguish between sales and marketing, and if you’re interested in doing pure-sales, you might not be interested in the idea of also “becoming a marketer” as well.
The bad news is that no channel supports pure selling in isolation, and email is no exception. You can’t just add leads and do nothing but send sales pitches and invites to sales meetings.
Think of it this way. Imagine a person that just approached random people and asked them if they’re interested in marriage. Would be kind of weird right?
Obviously you would have a whole lot of socializing and relationship building before you would even breach such a subject, and only with the right person once you get to know them.
Fortunately selling a product isn’t as serious as marriage, but the same logic applies. There has to be some relationship-building, otherwise you risk being too pushy, and in the case of email, seen as a spammer.
So you can’t only engage in sales activities, as it’s not a very wise or a productive way of converting most leads. And in fact, marketing can be defined as “the thing that we do before, in between and after sales activities”.
The good news is that you don’t need to be a marketer
In fact, anyone can do the best kind of marketing, since it doesn’t actually involve “doing marketing”. Paradoxical I know, but before I reveal this one best way to do marketing, let’s talk about why you need to do this.
Consider this, the fact is that not everyone is ready to buy straight away. However, you need keep the line of communication and the relationship active. And in order to do that, there has to be some activity in the meantime.
Obviously, you can’t just keep sending emails like “Hey, ready to buy yet?” or “Wanna do a sales call now?”. I hope that makes sense. But you have to send something to keep the line going. This is where “non-marketing” comes into play.
All you have to do is just share generous and useful information to keep people engaged and keep the relationship going until they are ready to buy. Now, it doesn’t hurt that doing all of this also builds a ton of trust. This means that doing the actual sales will be a lot easier when the time comes.
3) Segment your leads and personalize
If you send the exact same email to a whole bunch of random people, without accounting for their differences, bad things tend to happen. This is for two reasons. People will not respond to generic bulk mail with zero personalization. And secondly, the email inbox providers punish you for it.
Unfortunately, the term personalization has become associated with overcomplicated super-advanced marketing. This is where you see marketers trying to personalize to such a fine-grained level, that no two people receive the same email.
In this approach you build super-complicated systems that respond to people’s every action and customize the experience in real time. While “the perfect personalization” sounds all kinds of fancy, it’s unnecessary to start off with, and you might never need to get to that level.
The good news is that applying basic personalization will result in booking more sales meetings on autopilot, and get you plenty of love from the inbox providers.
As you start however, I recommend just creating broad segments based on the main differentiators in your market. For example let’s say that you’re in B2B and you would pitch people differently based on business-size. You would ask for the number of employees when acquiring the lead, and store the data in a custom field.
Then, you would create segments based on business size, so that you can broadcast different emails (or variations) to the different segments. You could also send different automated sequences to people with a different value in the “number of employees” custom field.
Now, I am just giving a random example. The differentiating points that you use will depend on several factors. For example: what you are trying to sell, and the main pain points in your market.
For an easy guide on easing into personalization with a step-by-step recipe, check out The Ultimate Guide to Personalized Email for Higher Conversions
I would love to give you more specific examples and ideas, but for that we would have to talk one-on-one. Consider booking a free-demo while I can still do those. I’d love to show you how email can help you book more sales calls and help close those leads.
4) Share case-studies and whitepapers
The best kind of marketing is where you don’t even do anything that requires any special marketer training. You just share useful information and bring value to your leads. And as it turns out case studies are one of the best types of information to share.
Your leads are going to love you for sending these. And as a bonus, you achieve a dozen different marketing objectives, without even trying. Among other things, these case studies demonstrate that you can deliver results. They also build trust, and demonstrate some amazing social proof.
And the best part is that they do a lot of pre-selling to where your job in closing the sale becomes almost a formality. Whitepapers accomplish similar goals (minus the social proof), but are a good thing to throw into the mix as well.
The other part I love about case-studies and whitepapers is that they are an amazing tool at getting tons of quality leads. In fact, marketers refer to them as “lead magnets”. You can simply put up an ad offering a pdf (or video) with a case study or white paper that is relevant to your ideal customer.
Ideally, it’s a case study about how someone solved a pain-point that they themselves have. In such a case, putting in their email address to see this case study will be a no-brainer for them.
5) Educate and inform
What is another way to perform almost ideal marketing, without even having to study marketing? Just focus on educating your leads. This also accomplishes most of the major goals in marketing, such as building trust and demonstrating authority.
As a bonus however, it results in people looking forward to, and opening your emails. This results in the inbox provider ranking your emails well which results in very high delivery rates.
Setting up sales calls with people who see you (or your brand) as an authority on the subject? The easiest thing on the planet. In fact, they become excited and can’t wait to speak with you! Selling in such a scenario is a breeze.
6) Adopt automation, beat the competition
Just like personalization, automation is another one of those things that are often over-complicated by overzealous marketing gurus. This leads to the false perception that you have to be a marketing-techie wizard in order to use automation. But this isn’t the case.
Yes, we support all the most advanced automation features if you really want to get advanced. However, this isn’t where you should be starting out. And the good news is that if you’re doing sales, the odds are most of your competitors are putting off automation for similar reasons.
That means if you start utilizing automation, you will get results that blow past all of your competitors. And the good news is that to start off, you can keep automation really simple. Yet, you will get to see amazing results and return on effort.
While we have a lot of educational content on utilizing automation, I think you will find it most useful to look at our popular starter guide – How to Get Started with Email Automation.
It follows the exact philosophy I’m trying to impart on you here. It’s much better to start today and do the basics, than to procrastinate until you’re ready to do the fancy advanced stuff.
7) Use this trick to uncover the best secrets
There are certain secrets in using email that are game changers. I’m talking about the kind of secret that when you discover it, you find that it can increase sales or bookings by orders of magnitude.
Now, in order to find these secrets, there are just two things that you need to do. The first thing is that you find a good source of education. One that reveals all the secrets that you need, without overwhelming you. Your best bet is to just grab a username for a forever-free account while we still give those out.
You will get a super-generous Emercury account that lets you use almost everything our platform provides. And as a bonus, you will be emailed the moment we publish new guides just like this one. It’s a very easy way to stay on top of all the information you need to crush your competition.
The second thing you need to do in order to discover the best secrets? You have to experiment. This is because every business and market and customer base is different.
The good news is that this is relatively easy to do with a platform like Emercury. This is because you get both an easy-to-use A/B testing functionality as well as precise and easy to read reports.
Don’t let this be a one-way conversation, get more sales by letting us help you
Everyone is different and has unique reasons why they choose to adopt a technology and how they do it. Now, I do talk to a lot of people in sales to understand your needs. However, I always love hearing from more people.
Feel free to book a free demo where we can talk one-on-one. I can show you how email can help you get more sales, often on autopilot. But you can teach me something as well. I want to know what you need from email in order to use more of it in sales.
Talking to people just like you has brought up some of our best innovations and features. For example we have recently introduced deep integration with Calendly because so many people in sales need it.
This is just another feature that makes the platform even more useful to sales folks, but why stop there. I’d love to hear from you and your thoughts, and learn all about your needs. So feel free to book a free demo while I still have time for those.
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