Using email to book new meetings sounds awesome. Unfortunately, it isn’t because it simply does not work effectively.
In our house we seem to have the ability to make a lot of trash. And every Monday night I wheel two big trash barrels down to the bottom of the long driveway and repeat the process in reverse on Tuesday nights. The only thing enjoyable about trash days is that Dinger loves to “do the trash” with me.
As much as I hate trash time, my feelings about email are even more negative. Let’s exclude newsletters that you get but delete, product updates, and other emails from legitimate companies that you may or may not have signed up for. Let’s also exclude phishing emails that you used to report to nobody in particular but later realized reporting them were a waste of your time and now you just delete them. After I moved all of the legitimate and very illegitimate emails into trash, I identified 26 emails – all from yesterday – that were cold solicitations from BDRs, account managers, customer service reps, marketing reps, and even CEOs.
I can’t show the 26 emails here but I can summarize so that you can see that:
- They will ALL be deleted
- They ALL suck
- They ALL lack credibility
- They ALL use automation and/or AI
- They ALL waste yours and everyone else’s time
Take a look at the screen shot below which shows the percentage of yesterday’s 26 that had:
You can tell that automation and/or AI was used because of the lack of graphics like a logo. You realize they were mass emailed because of the lack of personalization. 10% were personalized but it was creepy personalization. They have zero chance of working because they all ask for meetings – 35% of them in the first few sentences – before establishing any reason for having a meeting. They lack credibility when they don’t include a last name, company name or title. The writing is cringy awful. Not poorly translated into English cringy, as much as seventh grade education cringy. And even if the issues I mentioned weren’t problematic, most emails are pushing services that aren’t needed by most of us.
Their offerings fall into the following categories:
- Offshore SEO/web/software development services
- Lead Generation/Appointment Setting services, lists, marketing etc.
- Access to Capital
- Recruiting software/services
- And in my case, Guest Posts, Articles, Paid Speaking Engagements, etc.
Why would anyone, in any role, at any company, choose to waste the time, money, resources and effort to send out prospecting emails when in the worst of circumstances, they could make cold calls and one in fifteen calls will be answered? And when one in five will convert to a meeting? I get around 600 of these shitty emails each month and two cold calls. Emails don’t work and there isn’t much competition on the phone. Why aren’t salespeople making calls?
I’ll tell you why.
Salespeople have been spoiled by inbound leads, outbound emails, and BDRs generating leads for them. As a result, those in sales for fewer than ten years never learned how, and totally suck at cold calling. Those who used to cold call but have since stopped, forgot how and sucked at cold calling when they were doing it. That’s why they stopped!
You have three options:
- Send emails that don’t work
- Push through the discomfort, get trained in the art of making cold calls and call your targeted audience
- Get enough referrals and introductions so you don’t have to use either 1 or 2.
I’ve written about using the phone before.
Here is a link to self-directed online sales training that will make you better on the phone.
Using email to book new meetings sounds awesome. Unfortunately, it isn’t because it simply does not work effectively. What will you do?
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