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Advantageous E-mail Sure, electronic communication is fast and efficient. But do you know how to make the most of it? By Auren Hoffman Salespeople who can effectively use e-mail as a communications medium can be much more productive. Although e-mail is a staple of every salesperson's pitch, it is rarely used to its maximum effectiveness. Below I will discuss why e-mail is effective and provide tips on how to write your e-mails in order to achieve their maximum effectiveness. Advantages to Selling via E-Mail: Time dimensions are different today. People move much faster in today's world. They want documents fast (no waiting for FedEx) and in soft copy so they can edit them. They want variable pricing models (spreadsheet models that can calculate their price or their ROI given different sets of data). They want handy information at their fingertips. And they want it all now. Easier to return e-mails than voice mails. Voice mails rarely get returned. Why? Often times it is because the target isn't interested in the voice mail but more often it is because voice mails take a lot of effort to return. The target needs to get a pen, write down the phone number and the name, and then actively call the person trying to sell them. And making calls take time -- time that a target might not want to give up in the opening stages of a sale. E-mails, on the other hand, are very easy to return. Easier to forward e-mails than voice mails. Forwarding e-mails is simple -- and people do it all the time. Forwarding voice mails is more complex, takes more time, and can be more difficult (especially when you are away from the office and forget the extension of a colleague). If people are not interested, they will usually tell you faster via e-mail. Often times, when I am selling for BridgePath, I'll get a response via e-mail saying "this looks great, but we do not have a budget to buy your product for six months." That response allows me to concentrate my time on higher-probability prospects. I rarely get my voice-mails returned with a "no thanks" -- I usually just get silence. It is a good intro to put them on your monthly/quarterly newsletter. If you do not have a regular newsletter (I would suggest monthly or quarterly) that highlights your wins to your prospects, create one. You can easily send your newsletter via e-mail (you'd be surprised how many people read the BridgePath Executive Letter). If you send a prospect an introductory e-mail, be sure to let the prospect know that you are going to add her to your regular newsletter. E-mail can reach to the target easier. E-mail rarely has gates -- in fact, I have never had a sales target that didn't read their own e-mail. There are only a few CEOs that have their secretaries screen their e-mails. I see e-mail as the great equalizer. When I was in college I started an e-mail conversation with Steve Ballmer (now the CEO of Microsoft) because I sent him an e-mail that he found useful. When a starving college student can communicate with a billionaire at two in the morning, you know you have a powerful medium. E-mail addresses are easy to figure out. I always tell the salespeople at BridgePath -- if you can’t figure out the e-mail of a prospect, you don’t deserve to get the sale. There are only so many permutations of e-mail addresses -- and often times if you know one e-mail you know all the others in the company. Also, you can call up the front desk and ask for a prospect's e-mail address (they are more likely to give it to you than someone's direct dial). Funny story: A friend of mine attended an inspiring speech by a CEO at a hot technology company. That night, my friend sent an e-mail to the CEO with his resume saying how much he'd like to work for the company. But my friend did not know the CEO's e-mail address. So what did he do? He sent five e-mails to five different addresses – firstname.lastname@company.com, firstname@company.com, lastname@company.com, flastname@company.com, firstnamel@company.com -- hoping that one would get through. The next morning my friend received an e-mail from the CEO: "Heh, I got all five of your e-mails. You must really want to work here. Let's schedule an interview for tomorrow." Sure enough, two weeks later, my friend was working for the new company. Update all the influencers where you are in the process -- not just today's target. Often when you are making a complex enterprise-wide sale, as we do at BridgePath, you have many different influencers and decision-makers. In the old way of selling you'd move around the organization and go back-and-forth and get buy in from each decision maker in series. Today, e-mail makes it much easier to work in parallel. When I make a sale, I'm usually successful because I've sent a personalized e-mail at least once every two weeks updating everyone in the organization where we are in the process. You'd be surprised how seldom people communicate within a company. People are really appreciative when they get e-mails from me saying -- "Just wanted to let you know that I met with today and they had these thoughts about BridgePath …" Attached documents makes negotiating contracts faster. E-mail is the new way to negotiate contracts. Instead of faxing contracts with handwriting back and forth to one another, you can send an attached document quickly and easily. Programs like MS Word and Word Perfect allow you to track your changes (in Word go to the Tools/Track Changes menu) as you go forward. And if you are afraid your target might try to make untracked changed, you can do a document compare each time you get a marked-up version. Given all these advantages, you'll still be making lots of phone calls, sending letters, scanning faxes, and doing visits. You don’t get out of hard work just because you use e-mail. But e-mail is going to make all the other parts of your job easier. Tips for using e-mail: Writing good e-mails is really, really hard. Writing bad e-mails is really easy. Follow the tips below to get maximum results from your e-mails. Always remember that all e-mails can easily be forwarded. So write the e-mail in a way that it makes sense to someone who does not know you. Put things in context, spell out acronyms, and refer to people with both first and last names. Even if you've developed a great relationship with someone, find a way to be both friendly and professional via e-mail. Spell-check and proof-read e-mails before sending. People have a tendency to have lots of unprofessional errors in e-mails because they are a quick medium. Gammatical and spelling mistakes are extremely common. Do not fall into that trap. Copy the person that gave you the introduction. If the executive vice president asks you to talk to a specific person lower down in the organization, copy the EVP when you send the introductory e-mail. This does two things: It keeps the EVP in the loop. Since the EVP will probably be a key future decision-maker, you want to ensure that person is aware of what you are doing. It legitimizes you to the target. You really did get an intro from the EVP -- and you are proving it by the CC. Write a catchy subject line. The subject line is the most important part of the e-mail for a few reasons: Many e-mails don't get read. You need something catchy to get it read. The e-mail might get forwarded to someone else and you want that person to read it. E-mail subjects tend to live on for a long time because e-mail communication is generally in "reply" mode -- meaning I send you an e-mail, you reply to me, and then I reply back to you. All with the same continuing subject. You'll never see a BridgePath salesperson write "BridgePath" as the subject line. That's the easy thing to write, but it is not the most effective. Rework your "From" address. Most people's "from" address just consist of their first and last names. But you might be able to convey more information in the "from" field -- which is generally the most read part of your e-mail. All my e-mails come from "Auren Hoffman (BridgePath)" rather than just "Auren Hoffman." I know some people who add the one word that defines their product to the "from" field. But you have to be careful -- too much of a slick message will make your e-mail look like spam. Keep it short. Long e-mails don’t get read. Most people don’t realize this, so I'll repeat it in capital letters: LONG E-MAILS DON’T GET READ! So don’t write long e-mails. It is much harder to say what you have to say in a few sentences but your messages will bee much more effective if you can master a shorter e-mail. All paragraphs should be less than four lines long -- and use bullet points whenever possible. This is a rule -- don’t break it. People tend to easily skip over things when they read it on the screen. So make reading easy for people. They are probably not going to print out the e-mail (unless it is a newsletter), so be sure to write for the screen medium. The "P.S." is the most important part of the e-mail body. When you are sending an email and you want to stress something, be sure to include a "P.S." A "P.S." is generally the most read part of any e-mail. People will skip over a long body but they will almost always, instinctively, look at the postscript. Use this to your advantage by adding one to two sentences at the end of your message recapping what you said or discussing a new point of interest that you want your reader to look at. Some skilled letter writers will refer back to the middle of a letter to encourage readers to review the document in detail. I usually put the call to action in my postscript. I'm not totally keen on the "P.P.S." though -- sometimes that's overkill. But I've seen the post-postscript used effectively when it is combined with humor. If you send an attachment, tell people how long it will take to read it over. When I send attachments, I'll usually accompany them with the message "please review the attached document. It should take you about 12 minutes to read over." Giving your prospects a reasonable time frame to review a document shows them that you respect their time. It also allows them to plan to read it accordingly. Most busy people who get attachments will file the attachment away and forget to read it. Watch for formatting issues -- use simple text that translate well into any e-mail system. If you are writing an e-mail in MS Outlook, remember that the formatting options available to you are not available to many others who receive e-mails. So try to write the e-mails in plain text. Use a "*" rather than a formatted bullet. And watch for funny symbols, different font use, color use, or curly "smart" quotes. Keep the signature relevant -- don't put your title unless it helps. If you are sending a sales related e-mail, you don’t have to tell people you're a Sales Manager. Unless you are a VP or above, titles usually don’ help secure the prospect. Attach a vCard. I find it very useful when people send me a vCard with their e-mail. A vCard (usually a .vcf file) is an attached contact file that is compatible with many contact management systems like MS Outlook and Lotus cc:Mail. vCards carry contact info and you can also have them carry a marketing message and information about your product. I personally don’t use vCards but it is a good tool for sales representatives. About the author: Auren Hoffman is CEO of BridgePath (www.Bridgepath.com), an online competitor-to-competitor marketplace bringing temporary and permanent staffing firms together to create collaborative placement transactions through co-opetition. Mr. Hoffman previously co-founded Kyber Systems, an Intranet development firm, where he managed the implementation of Intranet and extranet systems for Bain & Company, Sybase, Charles Schwab, ASUS, EventSource and BizNet. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the founder of the Silicon Forum. George magazine named him one of six future leaders in December 1999 and VAR Business named him one of the top 30 entrepreneurs under 30 in December 2000. Mr. Hoffman holds a B.S.E. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley. Auren writes a monthly column called Summation (www.summation.net) detailing his philosophy on business, policy, and life. Contact for publication: Auren Hoffman BridgePath Corporation 463 Bryant Street San Francisco, CA 94107

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