Get Customers to Read Emails: 7 Tricks

Get Customers to Read Emails: 7 Tricks - Nice Read

The simple power of one a day

The simple power of one a day (from Seth Godin's Blog)

There are at least 200 working days a year. If you commit to doing a simple marketing item just once each day, at the end of the year you've built a mountain. Here are some things you might try (don't do them all, just one of these once a day would change things for you):

• Send a handwritten and personal thank you note to a customer
• Write a blog post about how someone is using your product or service
• Research and post a short article about how something in your industry works
• Introduce one colleague to another in a significant way that benefits both of them
• Read the first three chapters of a business or other how-to book
• Record a video that teaches your customers how to do something
• Teach at least one of your employees a new skill
• Go for a ten minute walk and come back with at least five written ideas on how to improve what you offer the world
• Change something on your website and record how it changes interactions
• Help a non-profit in a signficant way (make a fundraising call, do outreach)
• Write or substiantially edit a Wikipedia article
• Find out something you didn't know about one of your employees or customers or co-workers

Enough molehills is all you need to have a mountain.

A Confident Sales Person

An amazing salesperson will always beat an amazing product. You may only have the third-best product on the market, yet you can still beat out the competition and close deals with clients simply because you’re a better salesperson than your competitors. You may have an inferior technology, yet you can close a round of venture funding simply because investors believe in you more than they do the competition. A good company buys into the salesperson first. The product? That comes second.

20 Worst Prospecting Voice mail mistakes

1. Not leaving one so your prospect doesn’t have the chance to return your call.
2. Pretending you have called when you haven’t.
3. Not having planned what you want to talk about in advance.
4. Talking about your products, instead of things that matter to your prospect.
5. Speaking for more than 20 or 30 seconds without letting the prospect say anything.
6. Leaving a message that’s too short and doesn’t give your prospect a compelling reason to call you back.
7. Not showing that you have researched your prospect, and his or her situation, in your voicemail message.
8. Speaking so quickly that you can’t be heard. Or worse, mumbling.
9. Leaving a voicemail with lots of verbal pauses (like "ums" and "ahs") that make you sound less confident, and less credible.
10. Leaving a message and then passively waiting for a call back, instead of continuing to try to reach the prospect.
11. Not leaving your name and contact information at the end of the message. Better yet, leave it at the beginning when the prospect is poised to take notes.
12. Sounding too "canned" or "salesy" to catch your prospect’s attention.
13. Not mentioning your company’s website, if it’s your strongest sales tool.
14. Using a tone of voice that suggests you don’t expect a call back.
15. Not following up via other means, like email or handwritten note.
16. Giving up too soon, when most prospects won’t return your call until you have tried them more than nine times.
17. Not mentioning another company you have helped with a similar problem that the prospect is likely to have.
18. Failing to stick to one topic per voicemail message.
19. Not verifying that you have the right contact before leaving multiple messages.
20. Forgetting to mention a common colleague or someone who has referred you.