Ivan Misner’s most recent post is all about networking and the number of things you can do to mess it up. He says that although salespeople spend countless hours networking, he often sees them single-handedly sabotaging their own success by failing to follow up with the contacts they make.
Ivan gives a detailed example of this using a previous employee of his who was looking for a graphic designer to help assist with the creation of a website for her father’s business – so she contacted someone she met at a local networking mixer. Without giving too much away, the post goes on to say that the deal fell through because the designer failed to follow through, making his networking efforts a huge waste of his time.
SCW favourite, Paul Castain wrote today about the fact that a large number of prospecting emails you send are doomed from the get go. He points out that sadly, 60-80% of prospecting emails are never opened, let alone responded to, because they never make it past the subject line.
Paul says that readers don’t make it past the first checkpoint because the words used scream ‘SALES PITCH’ and indicate that this is something that should have been sent to a spam folder instead.
To support his argument he goes on to explain that the email you’re about to send who in the next 24 hours will go to someone who is going to do all of the following:
- Be exposed to 3,000 advertising messages
- Will be interrupted from what they’re doing 7 times per hour
- Will be engaged in multiple phone calls and receive a lot of emails
- May have external/internal meetings or customers that need to be tendered to
Shawn Karol Sandy posted today about her top tip for the best sales results – lather, rinse, repeat. She says that this technique was one of her most successful sales mantra’s when working as an accounts executive in Television, Commercial Print and Flexible Office Space.
She said that he would make it work by creating a solution or solving a problem for one customer by really learning the industry and the cause of their problems, then go and find 5, 10 or 50 people just like them to target because the deeper you can segment and target your audience, the higher you will convert.
