“Understand the problem that you’re trying to solve as much as you possibly can so you can be in the best position to solve it.” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 229

Do you have a discovery problem?

Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!

Jeff Bajorek on LinkedIn
The Why and The Buy podcast
208: You Don’t Have a Closing Problem – Jeff Bajorek
215: You Have an Opening Problem – Jeff Bajorek
222: You Have an Engagement Problem – Jeff Bajorek

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Jeff Bajorek. This is a continuation of the 16 part series that Jeff kicked off back in tip #208 called “You Don’t Have a Closing Problem” Here he is with today’s installment:

Jeff Bajorek: You don’t have a closing problem. You have a discovery problem. Yes, This is where the best truly separate themselves. When I study and work with the top, top, top performers. The biggest differentiator between them and anybody else’s, how much time they spend here, right here in discovery. This is where it’s all about your prospect. It’s all about your customer and it hasn’t have anything to do with you. People don’t care about your product here. They don’t care about the logos that you’ve worked within the past. They want to know that you understand their real needs. And here’s the deal, you need to know that you understand their real needs before you move forward. Stephen Covey used to say that “Before you climb the ladder to success, make sure it’s leaning against the right wall.” And I get called, I get calls, I get emails all the time. “Jeff, do you know how this tool integrates with this other tool that you’re already using? “ Not realizing that I’m not using either of those tools. That’s a waste of a message. It’s a waste of an outbound opportunity. Now, I’m sure that’s a lot more egregious than the situations you’re finding yourself in on a regular basis, but the lesson is still there. Understand the problem that you’re trying to solve as much as you possibly can so you can be in the best position to solve it. This is the part of the process where it really pays to slow down. Stop being in a hurry. I know that you’ve got a hundred calls to make and I know that you got so many meetings you need to set, but who cares if you set the meeting if it’s a garbage meeting. Think about what you’re really trying to accomplish and those people who spend the most time here. I’m going to keep going. This is even more ironic. They don’t talk about their product at all. I’m serious, Discovery is not the time to pitch your product. Discovery is the time for you to fully identify what the problem is so that you can go back to your own drawing board, come up with an effective message and an effective campaign to solve that problem at a later date. Your win for a discovery meeting is to get that understanding, get that diagnosis, and then schedule another meeting where you can actually talk to them about how you can solve it. This is running counter to just about everything you’ve ever heard when it comes to selling because you’re listening to the wrong people, but it also is running counter to that urgency that your manager and her manager and his manager above him is driving on them. Take your time here, really flesh out the problem and the rest of the process will go much more smoothly.

Scott Ingram: For more about Jeff and for links to the previous tips in this series just click over to DailySales.Tips/229 that’s also where you’ll find the video version of Jeff’s tip.

Thanks for listening and be sure come back tomorrow for another great sales tip!

“Don’t try and use disasters or some other major negative events that are happening to your clients to try and get them to do business with you.” – David Weiss in today’s Tip 228

How about you? Have you tried to use disasters to get them to do business with you?

Join the conversation below and share your experience!

David Weiss on Sales Success Stories Interview
David Weiss on LinkedIn
2019 Sales Success Summit

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. David Weiss sent this tip to me over the weekend and I wanted to get it out to you as soon as I could while Hurricane Dorian is still relevant, but as you’ll here this tip doesn’t just apply to this hurricane:

David Weiss: Good morning Sales Success Community. David Weiss coming at you here with a tip of the day. So as many of you know, there’s a very large hurricane coming towards the coast of Florida right now called Dorian. And I am working through a few other partners of mine at ADP on an opportunity that we’ve been working for quite some time and they happen to be located in Florida. So last week a colleague of mine came to me and said “David, I’ve got, I know you’re speaking to them later today. I’ve got a great idea of how we can close this opportunity on your call.” And I said, “Hey man, you know, I’m all ears. I think we’re pretty close, but what he got.” And he says to me “Let’s tell them that the hurricane’s coming and that they need to sign with us now because the hurricane’s coming, and if they don’t sign with us now, they may be delayed for a couple of days or even a couple of weeks, and that would mess up their timelines. And we can get working on everything behind the scenes while they’re repairing their business.” So I thought about this for a second and I replied back, I said “Look, there’s not a hurricane close technique. I’m going to have a conversation with them and we’re gonna, see where their business is at and their decision process and we’ll go from there.” So I get on the phone with the client and I started talking to her and the conversation, of course with the hurricane comes up and how she’s doing and how their associates are doing and things like that. And she says “David, I was gonna cancel this call, but I wanted to talk to someone that wasn’t going to talk to me about the hurricane.” And I start laughing and she’s like “If I had done a shot of Tequila for every single time, someone said Dorian to me today, and I would have been asleep by about 9:00 AM.” And she’s like “I currently have over a thousand emails in my inbox, no joke. And probably 8 to 900 of them are about my associates being worried about Dorian.” And I say to her, you know, tons of empathy. “Hey, appreciate taking the call, really understand where you guys are at”. And we just kind of had a really empathetic good conversation and it ended with her making a couple tweaks to our agreement and asking me to revise it so I could send it to her. So she’d get it over her legal team and our legal team would start reviewing it and we left the call with me saying “Hey look, normally I would, during this part of the call, I’d just be asking for basic timelines that we both agreed to serve on the same page with what things look like moving forward. But I’m not going to do that to you instead. I don’t want to put any pressure on you. I want you just to go and get your mind right. Help Your Business, help your associates, cause I really feel for all the stress you’re under and everything that’s, you know, up in the air right now it’s kind of chaotic.” And she’s like “David, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I took the call today because I needed a break. This was a really great conversation. I’ll let you know kind of how things play out over the next week. Perfect.” So we leave the call and this kind of comes to the point of the conversation. If y’all haven’t gotten it already, we weren’t at the final close step. Her legal team hadn’t even reviewed it and if I had put pressure on it to sign it today, this person like probably just couldn’t, it would have been the wrong time. She’s probably could have handled it. She’s a professional, but mentally speaking, like her head was not in a, I need to sign a contract with a vendor. You know, I need to protect my associates and I need to be there for my associates, for their houses potentially not low, longer being there in a week or two. So I shifted towards this part and you know, what I want people to take away is there’s no magic bullet. There’s no such thing as the hurricane close. Unless you’re selling products and solutions for hurricane management, like batteries and water or sandbags or something along those lines. Don’t try and use disasters or some other major negative events that are happening to your clients to try and get them to do business with you. Have empathy, have understanding, put yourself in their shoes and know where they’re at in their journey and be really honest with yourself, is a deal closing today or are we really there in the process? And if we’re not, let the process play out organically, but putting milestones in place that help you kind of get to where you need as far as you want to be alive by the state. We’re here today. Here are the steps that need to take place between now and then, but be empathetic that things are going to come up. So that’s all I have for you today. I hope you have a great week and hopefully, this was helpful and I’ll come back with more tips in the future. Thanks guys!

Scott Ingram: For more about David Weiss who will be one of the presenters at the Sales Success Summit next month, just click over to DailySales.Tips/228

Then be sure to give a listen tomorrow for the latest installment of Jeff Bajorek’s “You Don’t Have a Closing Problem” series. Thanks for listening!

“So there are three areas that we look at. One is Open Rate, two is Reply Rate and three is Conversion Rate. ” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 227

How do you troubleshoot your cold emails?

Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!

Jason Bay on LinkedIn
Blissful Prospecting
137: Writing Cold Emails Using the REPLY Method – Jason Bay

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting is back with his weekly idea to help us improve our prospecting efforts. Here he is:

Jason Bay: We get asked a lot of questions. You know about cold email and specifically, people want us to troubleshoot their pulling emails. So what I wanted to do is walk you through a framework that we look at to determine what this person that’s sending out the emails needs help with. So there are three areas that we look at. One is Open Rate, two is Reply Rate and three is Conversion Rate. So what I’m going to start with first is open rates. So there’s some I guess a controversy around like, “Hey, should you actually measure the open rate or not? Because if you are using open rate tracking you can decrease your open rate and that sort of thing. And there’s some controversy around how accurate it is.” I mean the bottom line is of when you’re first starting a campaign and you’re reaching out to a specific persona or ICP, you definitely want to measure the open rate because if your open rate is not between 30 and 50% if it’s lower, that’s a huge red flag. You’re getting less at-bats and ideally, you really want to be 50 plus percent. I would AB test until you get 60 to 70% on your open rate. So if you’re not in that range of 30 to 50% here’s where you can start. One, the most obvious one is the Subject Line. And in terms of subject lines, there’s a couple of quick tips here. Do you want to keep it between four to six words? Ideally, you want to use the person’s first name if you can in the subject line. So that may be like, you know, “Hey Jason was researching your company and like we use that one a lot, really like that one. And you might also put the company name in there.” So if you could put some personalization in there, that’s a really good thing to AB test. And another thing that we were doing after looking at a SalesLoft study is one word, subject lines. So if you could categorize and explain sort of what you do in one word, that’s a really great thing to do too. So like when we email people, you might use the prospecting or we might say outbound or we might just do sales pipeline. So those are stick out because people don’t tend to use one-word subject lines. So, and I think sales pipeline is actually two words. So one or two words, subject lines. The other most overlooked part of this as the intro line. So just remember when people are looking at emails on phone or on desktop, it does preview the first couple sentences of the email for them. So if you can personalize those first couple sentences, that’s a really, really good way to make sure that they actually look at the email and they, and they open it. So make sure it doesn’t look like a marketing email. Say something like, “Hey, you know, maybe a researching something on their website or you saw something on LinkedIn or whatever it might be like, make sure to personalize it.” So if your emails are getting opened and for whatever reason, you either are not getting replies or you’re not converting into appointments. There’s a couple of things that you can look at. So the reply rate, and really you want to be between 5 and 10% ideally again you’re 10% plus. But if for whatever reason people are opening but not replying, it usually falls into one of three categories. And this is based on the REPLY Method that we came up with, which is linked in the show notes for you to check out if you want to listen to the full episode on that. But the R stands for Results. So that’s the first thing I look at is, are you focusing on share on results that you created for companies like theirs? So are you sharing social proof. Are you telling them about the companies you work with and very similar to them that are experiencing similar challenges or utilizing case studies. And again, the case studies had to be relevant. They have to be for a very similar type of company. When you do this, you show specialization. So you don’t want to be this generic company that works with industry agnostic is what I hear a lot of salespeople say that their solution is, but that’s not the thing that the prospect wants to hear, they want to hear that you specialize. The other part that you can look at too is the empathy piece. And this is where you want to talk about the challenges. So a lot of outreach I see missing any sort of challenge that the prospect might be experiencing. So if you’re helping people build their sales pipeline, like lack of sales pipelines, a challenge, right? Low response rates to their cold emails is challenged to call out a challenge that they’re having. And then lastly, and what you want to look at as the L on REPLY is for Laser focus. So do you have a clear call to action? So you might need to actually look at what the call to action is. And I mean first off, do you have one, Right? And second off is in the form of a question and third mess around with how specific it is. So do everything from, does this sound interesting or “hey, do you want to chat further about this” to “hey, are you available this upcoming Thursday after 2:00 PM Pacific time to chat about this for 30 minutes?” That’s how specific you can be. So just kinda mess around with those. Ideally the emails between three to five sentences, 120 words or less. So that’s what I’m looking at. If the reply rates are low, if the conversion rates low, it’s oftentimes very, very similar. It’s a call to action, you know, being often needing to be tested. And the other thing that you can do too is called the prospect. So let’s say people are responding and you’re not converting them to appointments because people were saying not interested or they want more information on whatever it is. If you can be around when people respond to that and call them immediately, he actually might get some really good feedback that you could build into the emails. So when you’re troubleshooting, again, look at open rate, make sure it’s between 30 and 50%. Next, check your replying rate. It needs to be at least 5 to 10% and then your conversion or into appointments once. It needs to be at least 3 to 6% of the total emails that you’re sending. So hopefully that helps you out.

Scott Ingram: As Jason mentioned you’ll find links to more resources including the tip on his REPLY method in the show notes at DailySales.Tips/227. Jasons own emails are also really good, so do yourself a favor and join his mailing list as well.

Then come on by tomorrow for another great sales tip from David Weiss. Thanks for listening!

“Today I have more of a question than a tip, but I’ll try to find some ways to add value around the question by sharing some of my own experience.” – Scott Ingram in today’s Tip 225

How about you. Do you find yourself working on the weekends?

Join the conversation below and share your experience!

Sales Success Stories Book – Volume 2
Sales Success Stories Book
B2B Sales Mentors Book
Sales Success Stories
2019 Sales Success Summit

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or email [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I have more of a question than a tip, but I’ll try to find some ways to add value around the question by sharing some of my own experience. Since today is Sunday on a 3 day Labor Day weekend here in the US my question is this: Do you work on the weekend or on holidays? If you click over too DailySales.Tips/225 you can drop a comment there, or if your answer is a bit more personal and you just want to send your thoughts to me directly you can email me: [email protected], and be sure to use the number one in the email address.

For me, it depends a bit on what’s going on and where I need to prioritize. Some weekends are chock full of events with my daughters and when that happens I try to stay focused on the family and not work too much. My issue is that I think about this stuff a lot and struggle to ever fully disengage from work mode, or at least work brain. Some of these tendencies stem back to the entrepreneurial start of my career. I started my first company when I was 20 years old. I was single then as well, so weekends then were just another workday, albeit a quieter one that allowed me to focus more with fewer client demands. Now, most of my weekend work is more focused on all things Sales Success Media than it is on my day job. I do a better job of compartmentalizing my day to day Account Executive duties into a 9 or 10 hour workday during the week, and will often conduct interviews and knock out other tasks related to the podcasts, the book projects, and especially to the Sales Success Summit right now that that event is only about a month and a half away on the weekends and a lot of time in the evenings during the week as well. One of the things I’m planning on doing tomorrow on Labor Day is tightening up my organization and productivity systems. Things tend to get a little loose over the Summer, but now as we roll into September and my girls are back in school I really need to lock things down to make the most of the last 4 months of the calendar year.

How about you. Do you find yourself working on the weekends? Maybe you do your weekly prep Sunday evening like a lot of executives and many of the top-performing sales professionals I’ve interviewed do? Maybe you do a much better job than I do of disconnecting from the day to day on the weekends and are able to focus more fully on family, friends, and fun. I really want to know. Again you can comment at DailySales.Tips/225 or just send me a note: [email protected] with the number 1.

I appreciate you sharing your thoughts, be sure to swing by tomorrow for a killer tip from Jack Wilson, and thanks so much for listening. Enjoy your weekend!

“There were three key values that stood out for me. The first one was hard work. The second one was honesty and the third one was humidity.” – Vinit Shah in today’s Tip 224

What are your values? How do you take decisions?

Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!

Slice: Cutting Through to Excellence in Sales Leadership
Vintus Consulting
Vinit Shah on LinkedIn
Vintus Consulting on Facebook

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Vinit Shah. Vinit is a coach, trainer, and consultant based in northwest London, who works with small to medium-sized businesses in identifying their barriers to growth and implementing sustainable systems, processes and strategies. He is also the author of the book “Slice” which encourages aspiring sales professionals to harness the power of personal development. Here he is with today’s tip:

Vinit Shah: This is the most important lesson that you will learn in sales and for your personal development. Hi, my name’s Vinit and I’m going to share with you probably the most important lesson that I’ve learned in my 20-year sales career. It’s about understanding and appreciating your values. Your values are like a subconscious currency that helps you to set standards and understand the basis for the decisions that you are making. How do you understand or how do you identify what your values are? Take a blank sheet of paper. On the vertical axes draw a straight line top to bottom. At the top, you have positive elements and at the bottom, you have negative elements. Now draw a horizontal line straight through the middle, which is your time axes. I want you to now start thinking about your first memories and all the way through to your career and your life today. Start thinking about the positive experiences that you have, the negative experiences that you’ve had, the moments when you felt proud, the moments when you felt sad. I want you to plot all of these milestones on that chart. What you’ll start seeing is a pattern forming. You’ll start seeing a trend in terms of key values that underpin the person that you are. It’s those values that make you stand up for who you are today. When I completed this exercise for myself, there were three key values that stood out for me. The first one was hard work. The second one was honesty and the third one was humidity. Today, every decision that I take, it’s with those three values in mind. I have to make sure that I keep those front of mind and ensure that I am never letting anyone down or going against what I stand for. Now, I have a question for you. What are your values? How do you take decisions? How do you ensure that the decisions that you are making today or with your values in mind? Thank you for listening and that’s Vinit from Vintus Consulting.

Scott Ingram: more about Vinit including a link to his book: Slice, just click over to DailySales.Tips/224

Then be sure to come by tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“A fun live show in which today’s top performers share tips, tools, and process secrets that you can apply to your sales efforts today.” – Coffee & Closers with Mickeli Bedore in today’s Tip 223

So what are you waiting for?

Join the conversation below and check out the video version!

Mickeli Bedore on LinkedIn
Coffee & Closers

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I’ve got another sales podcast for you to check out. Give a listen to this trailer for the Coffee & Closers with Mickeli Bedore:

Mickeli Bedore: You know, it started simple. We thought what if we were together the top minds in sales today. Now, not the people that are getting all the headlines, No. People that we can all relate to, the ones that are in the trenches right now. And for 30 raw real minutes, we were to ask them to share exactly what they do to be successful.

Hi, I’m Mickeli and I’m Allison Bedore and this is Coffee & Closers

: Let me welcome you to coffee and closers.

: What is your prospect possibly doing right now? What are they in the middle of and be respectful of that

: Failure is like the condiment to success. You have to fail to succeed.

: Trust and credibility. It shows important, builds your reputation up and overtime as a sales rep, you do all the right things and you’ll wake up five years from now and you’re going to go, wow, this just got easier.

Mickeli Bedore: Over my sales career. I’m very fortunate to be mentored and coached by sinless, inspirational, motivational, and successful sales standouts ever carry a bag. I eventually realized very few people have access to resources like this today, so we created Coffee & Closers. A fun live show in which today’s top performers share tips, tools, and process secrets that you can apply to your sales efforts today,

Whether you’re in sales or not. In business, we all have to communicate our value effectively. So what are you waiting for? Grab a cup, fill it up and join us for another episode Coffee & Closers

Scott Ingram: This is such a cool model. All of Mickeli’s episodes are recorded at a live event that he hosts in Minneapolis, and if you thought the audio trailer was good. You really need to check out the video version. You can find that and links to more about the Coffee & Closers podcast at DailySales.Tips/223

Then come back here tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“The faster you can get them to engage, the more likely you are to take the next step in the sales process.” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 222

How can you show them you can be a valuable resource to them in that short amount of time?

Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!

Jeff Bajorek on LinkedIn
Jeff Bajorek on YouTube
Jeff Bajorek Website
The Why and The Buy podcast
208: You Don’t Have a Closing Problem – Jeff Bajorek

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or email [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Jeff Bajorek. This is a continuation of the 16 part series that Jeff kicked off back in tip #208 called “You Don’t Have a Closing Problem” Here he is with today’s installment:

Jeff Bajorek: Hey, it’s me. I’m back. Same shirt, different day. Wait, that’s your problem. You don’t have a closing problem. You have an engagement problem. You’ve managed to get someone on the phone. They picked up when you called. They looked up when you stopped by. Can you hold their attention for longer than eight seconds? Do they know right away that you can help them get to a better future state? Or are you too busy talking about your product, your service, your solutions, and all the fancy logos that you’ve helped in the past? When you make a presentation, do you start with the stereotypical slide of your corporate logo and your fancy building that helps hold your corporate headquarters? Give me a break, man. You know how many things I have to worry about running a business? You know how many things your prospect has to worry about running a business. They don’t care who you are or where you’re from. They do care. However, how you can help. The faster you can get them to engage, the more likely you are to take the next step in the sales process. The better you are at holding and captivating their attention, holding their attention and captivating them. The more likely you are to move them through your process, but it starts early. It starts right away, and if you don’t have some compelling message early on, you are going to be stuck in this step forever. You will be spinning your wheels. You won’t have to worry about closing sales because you won’t have a pipeline that’s full of anybody to sell anything to. The average attention span of your prospect is eight seconds. Can you show them you can be a valuable resource to them in that short amount of time or have they already moved on?

Scott Ingram: For more about Jeff and for links to the previous tips in this series just click over to DailySales.Tips/222 that’s also where you’ll find the video version of Jeff’s tip so you can check out his shirt and finally while you’re there consider leaving us a comment. We love those.

Thanks for listening and be sure come back tomorrow for another great sales tip!

“The things that you are building in your sales career and will give your prospects a specific type of credibility which leads to trust between the two of you over time. ” – Dale Dupree in today’s Tip 221

How about you? How do you quit beating around the bush?

Join the conversation below and share your experience!

Dale Dupree on LinkedIn
Dale Dupree Website
The Copier Warrior – Selling Local Podcast
The Sales Rebellion

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or email [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Dale Dupree from the Sales Rebellion is back to give us this tip:

Dale Dupree: So my tip today is about telling the truth and sales, which is kind of a no brainer, right? Except for the things I’m about to talk about that will hopefully ignite your brain and make you think deeper about this subject. Let me just spell out a scenario for you. You make a call to a prospect, prospect picks up, you start talking to them, your pitches on fire, you’re crushing every word, and then the prospect abruptly interrupts you, tells you they’re not interested in, hangs up before you can say anything else. Now, a lot of you out there probably walk away from that, but most of you that are listening right now, pick the phone up and hit redial. And what do you do when you hit redial and the prospect picks the phone back up? Well, you probably say something like this, “Hey, this is Dale. I think we got disconnected.” When the truth is, is that the prospect hung up on you, right? So why not call back to the prospect and say, “Hey, it’s Dale you hung up on me. I wanted to ask why.” And maybe you don’t get much of a different response than you would have, you know by the line in the first place. But let me tell you right now, ladies and gentlemen, that when you lead with the truth in your sales walk, others will see that and slowly over time it will cause people to be attracted towards your culture, the things that you are building in your sales career and will give your prospects a specific type of credibility which leads to trust between the two of you over time. This is the true form of sales and telling the truth is the most important piece of the puzzle when living your sales life.

Scott Ingram: For more about Dale and the Sales Rebellion and to comment on this idea, just click over to DailySales.Tips/221

Then come on back tomorrow for another great tip from Jeff Bajorek. Thanks for listening!

“So make sure to follow these fives tips and you’ll make sure that your email deliverability is as high as it can possibly be.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 220

How do you avoiding spam folder?

Join the conversation below and go check out all the links!

Blissful Prospecting
Jason Bay on LinkedIn
Mail-Tester.com
NeverBounce.com

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or email [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting is back with this tip:

Jason Bay: All right, we got an exciting topic today. Avoiding the spam folder. So why should you care about this? If you’re a rep or let’s say you’re a sales manager, you guys are sending cold emails, you’re getting less advanced. If your emails aren’t getting sent and delivered to the inbox and they’re ending up in the spam folder or maybe in the updates or promotions folder. If you’re emailing people that email accounts, it’s less at-bats, you’re spending a ton of time personalizing these hopefully, and it’s just wasted effort. So there’s a couple things to look for in terms of knowing what their deliverability, it might even be a problem. There’s a couple of tests that you can do. So the first thing I would look at is your open rate under emails. If your open rate is below 25% it’s unless the subject line is horrendous, you probably ever having deliverability issues and emails are getting sent to spam and we pushed to get our clients to 50 plus percent open rates. So I would say if your email open rates are under 50% there’s definitely room for improvement. The best way and this is linked in the show notes that you can test this to make sure there isn’t anything wrong with your emails is by sending a test email and it’s free to a website called mail-tester.com and what they’re going to do is spit out a really cool report for you. And what I want to focus on this episode though is primarily what you can do as an individual rep if you’re sending out these emails and then that report that gets spit out, it’ll have a lot of other things in there, like you’ll see SPF and DKIM and all this other sort of technical things. So send that report to your founder or if you have engineers and your team or whoever your it, people that can fix this stuff, send that report over to them. If it says there’s a bunch of problems. In terms of what you can work on as a sales rep and what is primarily it has to do with what you’re putting in the email. So I want to go over a couple of quick things. So the five tips are this,

1. Is avoid using spammy words. And I, there’s a list of 50 of these on a HubSpot article, but I picked about seven or eight here that I see most common in emails that you want to avoid. The first ones, dollar signs. So if you use the dollar sign, you use it very, very sparingly. So trying to make sure that it’s in reference to perhaps a case study or the amount of money that someone saved. And if at all possible, don’t use the dollar sign at all. That’s a really big spam trigger word. Don’t use the word click, don’t use the word free. If you’re using a lot of exclamation marks, that’s another trigger. Subscribe, sign up for you today. Risk-Free guarantee. These are all things you might be using, especially if you’re trying to get someone to sign up for a demo. So don’t use the word signup, use new checkout or “Hey, let’s grab a time to do a demo.” You know, use different verbiage than these. Click free subscribed, sign up and you’ll avoid ending up in the spam folder.

2. Avoid using link shorteners. So if you’re going to hyperlink to which say, which I do suggest that you do, I would turn off link tracking. So link tracking is going to create and if you look at the preview text when you hover over a link in like a newsletter email, you’ll see that it’s a different link than where it actually takes you to spam. Triggers are really good at picking up on that thing and if nothing else, it’ll you know, Landy in the promotions or updates folder. Like I said, if you’re emailing someone that uses G Suite, so don’t use link shorteners and you don’t want to put the full link in the email either. So if I was linking to our website, a blissful prospecting, I might have the words blissful prospecting in the email signature and then I would link to you know the http://blissfulprospecting.com I wouldn’t just say BlissfulProspecting.com and like put the full link in the email and that’s another little hack there.

3. And this is sort of controversial, but you want to provide an easy way to opt-out. Preferably what you would do is provide an unsubscribe link. So make sure that you have an unsubscribe link, but don’t use the word unsubscribe in the link. What we use is don’t want to receive these emails anymore, question mark and that hyperlinks to a way to unsubscribe to the emails. So make it easy to unsubscribe. If it’s not easy and people don’t want to receive emails from you, they’re going to click send to spam and that’s going to make more of your emails going to the spam folder.

4. High bounce rates. You really should be below 5% bounce rates and ideally you’re only around one to 2% so if your list quality’s really bad, you can use a software called NeverBounce.com you guys can scrub your list before you’re sending them out and you may or may not be in charge of building your own less, but if you are or you have a sales enablement team doing this for you, make sure that you guys are using something like NeverBounce. And lastly

5. Don’t email too frequently. I know that, again, this is controversial and probably will make you pick up the phone more, so you really want to space out the emails at least two to three days apart. I see a lot of, especially in SAAS land where people are emailing someone every day, cold emailing them every day and that’s just too much. Again, it’s not, Hey, I’m sure it works, right? Some of the time it works, but the rest of the time people are getting really irritated and sending your stuff to spam. So we space out our emails two to three days apart, and as the cadence progressive and as we send more emails and more weeks go by, if we haven’t heard back from somewhere, emailing them, less than, less than less, we aren’t continuing to hound them every other day. Now again, this is a good reason for you to be picking up the phone or getting on social and re-engaging the prospect in a different channel. So make sure to follow these five tips and you’ll make sure that your email deliverability is as high as it can possibly be.

Scott Ingram: For links to all things Jason Bay, including the mail tester website that he mentioned you can click over to DailySales.Tips/220. We always provide transcripts of the tips on the site as well and this is one where it might be helpful to have Jason’s breakdown of all 5 tips.

As always, I appreciate you listening to the podcast. Please make sure you’re subscribed in your favorite podcast app and come back tomorrow for another great sales tip!