19

E-Mail Prospecting

Your e-mail inbox is a bit like a Las Vegas roulette machine. You know, you just check it and check it, and every once in a while there's some juicy little tidbit of reward, like the three quarters that pop down on a one-armed bandit. And that keeps you coming back for more.

—Douglas Rushkoff

E-mail is a powerful part of a balanced prospecting approach, and when leveraged intelligently it opens doors, gets results, and generates far more engagement and response than social prospecting. When I say far more, I mean 10 to 20 times more.

It also has the added benefit of extending your prospecting window, which makes you more efficient. With the many e-mail communication tools that are available, including Yesware, Signals, Tout, Tellwise, and your own CRM, you can create e-mails outside of the Golden Hours and schedule them to go out during prime selling time while you are on the phone or face to face with prospects and customers.

The data these tools provide also make your e-mail prospecting efforts more effective because you can test and measure response rates. This helps you hone and perfect your message. Once you have a message that you know works for a particular market vertical or group of similar prospects, you can send it out with minimal effort.

It's also easier than ever to build a database of e-mail addresses. Besides just asking for them, you can grab e-mail address through Google searches, social media, scraping programs line eGrabber's E-Mail Prospector, ...

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