Stalker Sales
In sales, we track open and click-through rates on the prospecting emails we send out. Who opened our emails, and who clicked through to our website from the links provided in the emails? You want to know these things because they show prospect interest and can help better guide your prospecting efforts.
Currently, I have two methods of sending mass emails: Salesforce or FrontSpin. Salesforce allows you to see the time the email was first opened, how many times it was opened, and when it was last opened, in an HTML email status report you can reference after sending the mailer. FrontSpin does things a little differently. It notifies you immediately in a notifications panel that your email has been opened and links to the prospect so you can call them. It does not give you the ability to retroactively analyze open rates. It’s more in real-time.
Real-time capabilities are seen as being a competitive advantage in many different types of software, sales enablement platforms notwithstanding. But here, I actually prefer Salesforce’s retrospective view at email opens, and here’s why.
How would you react if you opened a sales email, and one minute later a salesperson called you about that product? How did they know you were just reading their email? Wouldn’t you feel a bit…stalked? I don’t feel like prospects react positively to such quick reachout. What would your impression of the salesperson and company be? Would you not think of them as possibly desperate?
Bear in mind that opening an email is a low amount of interest. They could have opened it just to delete it. They could have opened it 20 times just because they keep going back over it in their inbox — not because they’re reading it with rapt attention. You have to temper your expectations about the level of interest these activities mean.
Because it’s a weak trigger, I don’t follow up with every person who opens my email. That wouldn’t even be productive. I do, however, put those with a decent number of repeated opens in for a call the following day. That way the subject of our product is still fresh on their mind — the point behind real-time follow-up — yet you do not seem stalkerish or desperate when approaching the potential customer.
This does not apply to more actionable trigger events, such as marketing collateral downloads. Those should be followed up with within five minutes for best results. I won one of my biggest deals that way. The prospect downloaded a white paper, and before he could even have a chance to read it, he got a phone call from me, and we launched into a 20-minute discussion about his pain points and moved right along to setting up a demo. I turned a passive activity like downloading a white paper into something actionable like a meeting with our sales executives. That person may never have been a customer of ours if it hadn’t been for my actions as a salesperson — if that lead hadn’t been followed up with. I am very meticulous about following up with anything even remotely warm. I have a healthy pipeline of interested contacts at all times.
In any case, all of this was brought on because my work has switched to using FrontSpin for mailers, and I’m sick of getting the useless real-time notifications of opens. There’s not even an option to retroactively see who has opened the emails or how many times. Just this notifications panel. Not how I would prefer to do things. I also hate that it staggers the sending of emails — why can’t it send them all in a single batch like Salesforce does? — and places a copy of the email in my Outlook sent folder (Salesforce doesn’t). That just clogs up my email with prospecting emails I don’t need a copy of outside of Salesforce. The logic behind these design choices is questionable. But I digress.
I’ve never been accused of not being persistent enough, but you have to know when and how to be persistent. There is little use spending your day following up with everyone who opens your email. Why we are leading new sales professionals to believe that that is the right approach is beyond me. You have to use some discretion.
My rule is:
Approach people the way I’d want to be approached.
If I wouldn’t want an immediate phone call from a stalker salesperson, I don’t do it. I get good results following this barometer. I am somehow persistent without invading people’s boundaries.
The more experienced you get in sales, the easier it will be to find the right balance of persistence and politeness to get results. You always have to bear in mind that you are interrupting someone’s day with your sales pitch, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t reach out…and often.
