Email for the Sales Force – How it Should be Used

If you’re anything like me, you get 300 emails a day and there simply isn’t time to respond to it all during office hours.  That is one of the reasons why working hours often begin in the wee hours of the morning and don’t end until the late night television shows are over.

Email does not replace phone conversations, but it is a terrific tool for reaching many people with the same message.  Email is not engagement, but it is great for confirmations, sharing agendas, confirming details, sending qualified quotes and proposals at a specified time, asking a quick follow-up question, and providing a link to a testimonial, product feature, sample, form, resource or reference.

These days it has become very difficult to reach people by phone.  One upside of email is that  that it provides a non-threatening alternative to reaching your contact.  When you have the ability to send an email from Outlook and see whether it gets opened and read, it helps to explain why your calls aren’t being returned.  If they open and read it but don’t respond, or they don’t even open it, their message to you is the same as the one they sent when they didn’t return your voice mail message either.  Message:

• You are unimportant.
• You aren’t adding value.
• You aren’t helping me.
• You are wasting my time.
• I don’t want to do business with you.

You are being passively rejected but at least you know where you stand!

On the downside, for sales teams and salespeople, especially those who are less socially inclined, it has become all too easy to hide behind email and avoid the phone.

Why are we talking about email?

I have been using ToutApp for about a month and love it so much that I have shared it with my teams at both Objective Management Group and Kurlan & Associates.  ToutApp has been an unbelievable productivity tool, helping me manage email templates, multiple recipient groups and email tracking with ease.  For instance, I know from its dashboard that I recently used 5 different templates to email 91 people and can see, in real time, who has opened, viewed and clicked a link in those emails.

I was able to share my templates across my team for consistency, respond to individual incoming emails in Outlook by simply clicking the appropriate template, and track whether my responses from Outlook were being opened and read.  Add the fact that ToutApp is a plug-in for both Outlook and Gmail and it becomes a must-have for the proactive sales team.

It’s never to late to get your salespeople using email in the most intelligent, efficient and effective way.

Email me and let me know what you think!