Lead Nurturing - 3 Ways To Get A Reply

Here’s an email I received recently.   Effective, or not?

"Hi David,  I have tried reaching out to you a few times now but it seems as if my timing could not get any worse.  I saw that you have expressed some interest in X by downloading some of our content so I just thought it would be a good idea to speak with you for a couple of minutes in order to gauge whether I could help you or not. Let’s connect sometime today or next week, which time works best for you?  Thanks David!"

At least the subject line worked (I opened it).   But there’s nothing in this message that will get me to respond.  If you want prospects to reply, do these 3 things:

1) Ask For What You Want (Be Specific)   If you want a phone conference, ask for it.  Effective salespeople ask for what they want, and make specific proposals, like this:  “Let’s talk for 15 minutes on Monday at 10amPT (or would Tuesday at 4pmPT work better for you?).”   That’s how you ask for a meeting, while offering the prospect an alternative.   

“Let’s connect...sometime today or next week” is not compelling.  “What works for you?” provides zero guidance.  Don’t make your prospect guess at your availability.  

2) Make Your Case  If you want a meeting, please give them a compelling reason to say yes.  If you want a meeting “to gauge whether I could help you or not,” well, you should already know the answer to that one!  If you think you can help them, say so:  “I can help you achieve X.”   If you are not sure if you can help them, you've got the wrong prospect, the wrong value proposition, or your confidence needs a boost.      

3) Grab, and Hold, Their Attention  Your first lead-nurturing sentence is the most important.  So why are you starting with your own troubles as a salesperson?  (“I’ve tried reaching out to you...”).  Do you think your prospect really cares that you’ve found it hard to reach them?  

Lead with something interesting or significant.  Or, express gratitude, and ask a meaningful question (“Thanks for downloading X, can you please share with me which feature you found most compelling?”).  Explain how someone else is using X successfully.  Share a fact that will be useful to their business or career.  

Ask for something specific.  Explain why.  Say something useful.  Do these 3 things, and your replies will grow.

MASTERING THE CONVERSATION

Selling is fundamentally about conversations.

Sometimes they happen in emails.  Sometimes on the phone.  Sometimes face-to-face.

But it all comes down to this:  what words are you using, and how are you using them?

When I was a lawyer (now fully recovered), words were everything.  Lawyers are careful about words because they affect outcomes.

Same thing with sales.

Your first ten to fifteen seconds on the phone with a prospect are important.  Get the words right.

Your email’s subject line matters.  The content matters.  Before you compose your email, follow the advice of my tax law professor:  “Think it through.”

Mastering conversations also requires good timing.  Reply immediately, or at the end of the day?  

Think about the best venue for your conversation.  Just because you received an email doesn’t mean it’s the best forum for your next communication.  Perhaps you should advance to a phone conversation, or an on-site meeting.  

Read carefully.  Emails can be misleading.  Without gestures, tone, and pitch, you may not understand what a prospect is truly thinking.   I’ve sometimes mistaken curt language for anger.  One of my maxims:  when in doubt, pick up the phone.

Lead qualification is all about words.  

Sales:        “Do you have budget for this?”  

Prospect:   “Absolutely!”

That’s an example of a poor initial qualifying question yielding a vague answer.  Choose your words differently, and you can do a better job of qualifying.

THE #1 PROBLEM WITH COLD CALLS

Reports of the death of the cold call are greatly exaggerated.

I received two of them lately.   But neither were very good.

After decades of books and seminars and in-house training, why are salespeople still so bad at making cold calls?

The key problem:  the salesperson doesn’t explain why they are calling.

Most cold calls I get begin under the ruse of a survey, such as, “I’m just wondering what CRM tool you are using,” as if I might leap at the chance to disclose this to a total stranger.

The call I received today also began with a question, something about whether I managed a certain type of team.

Please:  just start by telling me your name, your company, and what you do.  

Feel free to complete your first sentence with a question.  But don’t hide the fact that this is a sales call.  

“Hi I’m Dave calling from Appcelotron, we help companies share large files, I apologize for barging in on your day but I wondered if you might be interested in a better way to share large files?”

That pitch takes all of 12 seconds to deliver in a moderately-paced voice.

Feel free to take out the apology, or add some spice to the value proposition, but don’t leave out the most important part:  who you are and why you are calling.

IS THE SALE LOST, OR ARE THEY JUST BUSY?

Many times you’ve done a great job during your first call with a prospect.  You’ve identified a real need, and they’ve agreed on a date and time for a second call.  

Then the prospect fails to show up.

So an email goes out, and a follow up phone call, in hopes of rescheduling.  This was a buyer, not a tire kicker in need of brochures.  Sending them a whitepaper at this point is, well, pointless.

What do you do?

a) Persistent patience.  

   There are all kinds of reasons for a no-show.  Illness.  Vacation.  Week-long trainings.  Sudden change in priorities (your prospect is in a large company and has finally found a window to solve a nagging problem, but now his boss comes in and closes that window, reassigning him to a different task).

   Try reaching out at different times, using different methods.  Check with his colleagues, at the same level on the org chart; below that level; or if necessary, above.  And if that feels uncomfortable, enlist your manager as a wingman for this task.

    

   After several failed attempts, I’ve sometimes sent an email with this subject line:  Are We Done?  It regularly gets some kind of a reply.  

  The goal here is not to keep up appearances by sending this person relevant content every week.   You need to find out why the agreed next step is not happening, and whether this opportunity really exists, and what the real timeline is.  

b) Re-check your qualification

   Even though the prospect agreed to call #2, it could be that their actual timeline is far different than you thought.  Their disappearing act could be a version of “the check’s in the mail.”   Rather than rejecting you directly, they found it easier to talk at length and schedule a meeting they viewed as optional.  

  In some cultures, this is a way of “saving face.”   For example, in Japan, you may never hear “no”; you will simply hear a lot of “yes” that does not materialize.   

 When people don’t show up, you may have identified a serious need, but no real timeline, i.e,. the buyer has no commitment to do something about the need near-term.

Sometimes buyers will tell you this in the first call.  Just be sure you are listening!  Don’t let a screaming need cloud your other senses.

GET MEETING TWO DURING MEETING ONE

You’ve had a great first call with a prospect.  You asked about Need, Timeline and probably Budget and Buying Process.

   How should you end this call?

   a) Thank them profusely and promise to call them next week

   b) Send them the whitepaper they wanted, right after you hang up

   c) Invite them to join your LinkedIn network

   d) Schedule the next step

I hope you picked d).      

If you’ve determined they are a qualified buyer, the best next step is to get an agreement on the time and date for the next meeting.  Always leave sufficient time to do this at the end of your call.  

The best time to get someone to calendar something with you is right now, when you have them on the line.  Even if they need to invite colleagues whose calendars are unknown, pick a date and time as a placeholder.  

If they refuse to provide a date and time you are no worse off for asking, and you may have just gained some additional insight into their true needs and timeline.

HOW TO IDENTIFY BUYERS

It’s not an easy thing, parsing interest from need.  

If we can accurately parse, i.e., qualify, then we can spend more time with people who are ready to buy.   And allocating our time wisely is how salespeople make quota.   

Here’s a good self-diagnostic:  how many sales are you losing to the competition?  If the deals you lose are due to competition, congratulations!  you’ve been spending time with buyers.  

So how do you know if someone is just kicking the tires, or whether you are just in a really long sales cycle?

A buyer does these kinds of things:  

- identifies a real, meaningful, material pain or goal;

- indicates that, to some degree, time is of the essence;

- involves you with more than one person at their company;

- takes a test drive;

- reveals their full shopping list (perhaps an RFP); and/or

- has tried or at least fully investigated other solutions.

The first one is the most important.  An initial qualifying question to ask is, “how did you become interested in us?”  

If they just read an article about you in TechCrunch that’s nice, but it says nothing about whether they have the kind of toothache, or ambition, to buy anything from you.

Window shoppers look more like this:

- their primary (or sole) inquiry is regarding price;

- there is no driver for their inquiry:  no pain, no incident, no project, no RFP, nada;

- they demand information immediately, i.e., they are facing a deadline for filing a report, not in the process of making an informed purchase;

- only one person seems involved in the sale (most companies don’t buy in a vacuum); and/or

- they have not looked at any competitive solutions.

Making quota is not about forcing as many square pegs as you can into round holes.  It’s about qualifying prospects, and allocating more time to those who intend to buy.

SALES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

In Sales, who you know is much less important than it was ten years ago.  You no longer need a "rolodex" to reach prospective buyers.  Today, we're all reachable and knowable, through blogs, tweets, and profile pages (thank you LinkedIn).  A question that used to give salespeople a headache --- "Who is their IT Director, and how can I reach him?” --- is no longer a migraine.    

What you know is also less important.  Salespeople no longer own all the available information about their products/services.  Buyers don’t require brochures or on-site visits to get the ball rolling. Today, the buyer may know 75% of what you know by reading your website, whitepapers, third party reviews, and blogs.  And they may know quite a bit more than you, because a buyer can often get better access to competitive product data, including pricing.    

We are becoming a world in which all people are reachable and all data is available.  In that world, how can salespeople continue to add value?  

Here are a couple of answers.  

Salesperson as Catalyst  

The modern salesperson's task IMHO is not so much to "get in the door" as to get on the buyer’s To-Do list.    Regardless of their access to data, buyers still wrestle with priorities and decisions.    Salespeople need to understand that To-Do list, and try to find ways to help buyers overcome inertia (or to find reasons to  re-rank their top three initiatives).  

An example:  I have a long list of products and services that I am currently thinking about buying related to my home.  I will take action on very few.  But a polite, persistent stream of intelligent contact from a salesperson might get me off the dime on one of them, or at least get me to make a decision sooner.  

Salesperson as Advisor  

Buyers have more information, but can probably still benefit from advice on how to make sense of all that data.  Separating the wheat from the chaff is still a considerable task. This means that salespeople today need to deeply understand the competitive products, and to act as advisors and domain experts, as opposed to simply being an evangelist for their own offerings.   

5 WAYS TO GET PEOPLE ON THE PHONE

A big part of sales is making contact with prospective buyers, or with others needed to push the ball forward.  In most opportunities, there’s going to be at least one phone conversation before the PO arrives or the credit card is swiped.

So how do you figure out when someone is available to talk?   So much of a salesperson’s time is spent just trying to gauge availability.  

Here are five ways to increase the odds that you’ll actually reach your prospect by phone:   

1) Find out their schedule.  You can ask in your first email exchange:  “what is the best time to reach you?”  Or try something like this:  “is the best time to reach you early morning, or late in your day?

2) Use your CRM tool.  When you (timely) log your call attempts in a tool like Salesforce, it will record the time of your call.  Maybe your prospect is never there because you keep calling them at the same (bad) time.     

3) Try odd hours.  If you read enough Dilbert, you know that most corporate employees are in meetings most of the day, particularly between 10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm.    

4) Mobile phones.  Many people use their office phone as a voicemail box, and won’t ever pick it up.  But when their mobile rings, they’ll at least give it a glance.  You can also send a text message asking about their availability for a conversation.  

5) Travel.  One of my reseller partners regularly told me when he’d be on the road, because it was easier for him to talk then (hands-free, of course).   An IT Director at a large cosmetics company asked me to call after 5pm, when he’d be commuting home. People will also have downtime while at airports.