One of my regular daily tasks is going through my email inbox and adding another 20-30 email addresses to my spam filter (over and above the dozens of emails the spam filter has already picked up, that is…).
At one level, I get it. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
If you’re in a competitive market, there’s an argument that you don’t want to leave any stone unturned in the search for a sale. And if you have a lead (we’ll come back to this topic in a moment) you don’t want to let it go for as long as there’s any hope, however small, of making a sale.
That’s natural. And, to some extent, understandable.
But like most things carried to extremes – including eating ice cream, apparently, according to my doctor – there comes a point where you’re doing more harm than good and you should probably stop.
Except this is usually where several dozen people a day play a script in their head that goes something like “well, it costs nothing to send another email, so why don’t we just keep sending emails on the off-chance he buys at some point in the future?”
There’s an old saying in sales that the money is in the following-up. And you’ve probably heard the old rule of thumb that you need to contact a prospect seven times before you make a sale.
So continuing to follow up seems smart, doesn’t it?
There’s zero cost, and there’s still a chance, however small, that I might buy from you at some point in the future.
Well, it sounds smart.
But it’s almost certainly dumb.
My list
I’m not normally a vindictive person.
But after the 10th or 20th “Hey Alastair, I see you haven’t responded to my last follow-up. Are you available on Thursday at 10am or 2pm for a call?” email from the same person, I can guarantee you the last thing on earth I’m ever going to do is buy anything from your business.
At this point, you’re not being smart. You’re actively damaging your brand in my eyes.
That goes up at least a couple of orders of magnitude if you’re selling a product I’m really unlikely to want anyway, and yet you still won’t get out my emails.
You might think that I should just unsubscribe…or my personal pet hate, take them up on their offer to “Just reply ‘No thanks’ to opt out of future emails”
There are many reasons I don’t do this, but one of the main reasons is that the minute I unsubscribe or respond, the spam merchants know they’ve got a “live” email address and, for the less scrupulous among them, that’s a sign to amp up the intensity of their email campaigns, and to sell my details to other people just like them who will do the same.
I know that’s totally against GDPR and every data protection law on the planet, but given that I never signed up for, or expressed an interest in their products in the first place, I have zero confidence that the people who email me daily with invitations to jump on a call are not con artists.
So I consciously trade a few minutes a day to add the new spammers to my block list, because if I didn’t, and actually unsubscribed or responded, I’d get a tsunami of even more irrelevant emails.
However this is a useful exercise in other ways, because I now have a list of businesses I have such a poor opinion of that I’ll never do business with them. I’m not saying they’re all unethical scammers – I’m sure one or two of them are just over-enthusiastic amateurs – but I try not to do business with either amateurs or crooks if I can help it.
They can send me a bazillion emails. I’m still not responding.
Turn your thinking on its head
Honestly, buying a crappy list from somewhere and using a spam email outfit to send out millions of emails every day to pester potential clients isn’t a good strategy – even if, in the short-term, you might make a sale or two.
I know somebody somewhere is delighted that my email address is one of the thousands of business email addresses on their email prospect list. But that misses the point.
The part of the process which seems to have escaped these organisations is that I’m not a prospect for what they’re selling at all.
They think the length of their prospect list is all that matters, because the more prospects they have, the greater the likelihood of making a sale, right?
But I’m prepared to bet that 95%+ of the “prospect list” of those organisations aren’t prospects at all. Worse than that, they are people without the slightest interest in your product and a growing animosity towards your brand.
If you haven’t done even the slightest bit of qualification of those “prospects”, you’re kidding yourself if you think another 1,000 email addresses acquired the same way are going to help.
For me, the measure of a really good sales and marketing process is how well potential clients are qualified out early in the process.
I know the people emailing me every day don’t do this (because if they did, I wouldn’t keep getting their blasted emails) but pruning your prospect list really hard right at the start of the sales process is how you get the space and time to give genuine prospects the attention they need to make a sale.
If you’re relying on 0.0001% of people responding to the 1000s of emails you diligently send out every day to make a living, I can guarantee you’re not qualifying your prospects nearly hard enough – especially in B2B (there’s a slightly better argument in favour of playing the numbers game in B2C…not a great argument, but a slightly better one).
At best, you’re wasting your time. At worst, you’re actively damaging your brand by irritating your potential customers.
Why it’s not the great idea you think it is
I understand the arguments about persistence, not wanting to let a lead go, and making sure you get multiple contact points with your potential clients.
The problem with all that is – like a lot of things that have been going on perfectly well for years before the tech crowd got involved – those rules were all developed pre-tech and have been badly translated into tech-speak by tech folk who want to sell you something.
Take the seven touch points rule, for example.
In the old days, you might meet someone at a business exhibition and get their business card.
You might send them a brochure afterwards. You might call in to see them next time you’re in their part of the world.
You might have a chat about all sorts of things, beyond their business, over a coffee. You might run through some of the Mackay 66 (a reference for the boomers there…).
You got to know and understand the people you were dealing with, and some appreciation of the business they ran and the challenges they faced.
You might notice an article in a business magazine, which you’d clip out, and stick in an envelope together with a handwritten note, because you thought they might be interested. Or one of their kids, who they mentioned in your last conversation over coffee, might be interested in.
This would continue for a while and, as it did, the relationship would deepen. A degree of mutual trust would be established. And next time this person needed the sort of products or services your company sells, they are probably going to ask you to take a look and give them a price.
Now, contrast that process with buying my email contact details from some shady list broker, then sending me an email, followed by 100s of “Alastair, I haven’t heard from you yet – can we have a chat on Thursday at 10am or 2pm?” email follow-ups.
Even if you send me 10x as many emails as the number of contact points I would have had in an “old school” sales process, you’re probably not at 1% of the likelihood of making a sale.
And the crucial thing here is that if you send me another 10x, and then another 10x, you’ll still never be any closer to making a sale.
That’s because all an email does is maintain the relationship with your prospect at the same level (to the extent it doesn’t cheese them off completely).
By the time you’ve had 7 in-person meetings with a salesperson, in a range of different settings (their office, the coffee house, the football game, and so on) you’ve deepened the relationship. You are now vastly more likely to make a sale than you were at the start of the process.
Or…after your prospect has turned down three or four suggestions in a row that you catch up for a coffee…you take the hint, and realise this isn’t going anywhere any time soon. So you stop asking, and take them off your prospect list so you have the time to reinvest in someone who might be more interested.
You’re getting feedback through this process which is worth a lot more than the billionth “Hey, Alastair. Are you free Thursday at 10am or 2pm? I’d love to tell you more about our company” email.
And what you really want in a sales process is feedback. That helps calibrate whether or not you’ve got a live prospect or not.
The indifference you get from 100,000 identical daily emails that nobody responds to gives you pretty much zero useful information of any kind.
Here’s the trick
So here’s the trick.
Remember we’re all about the bottom line around here.
And not just at the superficial (and incredibly stupid) level of “sending emails is free, so it’s cheaper than employing a salesperson”.
(Which often isn’t true, by the way. Firing three salespeople because “they’re too expensive”, but replacing them with 20 people in your marketing department to manage your email traffic is unlikely to be a smart decision.)
Of course, you don’t want to spend more than you have to. But your objective in a sales process is to make sales.
It isn’t to send out more identical emails today than you sent out yesterday. Nor is it to “save money” by firing all your salespeople and replacing them with AI-generated daily emails.
Neither of those things are going to make you sales.
But what you can do very easily is to pretend things cost you money, even if they don’t.
Let’s imagine that it costs you £10 to send every email – still a bargain relative to an in-person sales call, right?
Just elevating your process from “completely free” to having a cost of just a tenner means all sorts of other considerations kick in.
Now how many identical emails that nobody responds to are you going to send?
Still some, perhaps. But not many.
After a while, you’ll take people who don’t respond off your mailing list because it’s costing you a tenner every time. Only a lunatic keeps throwing £10 notes at a potential client on a daily basis when the prospect shows no sign of buying.
When you think about a sales process beyond a purely superficial level – even if you force yourself to think that way by pretending it costs a tenner a time to send an email – pretty quickly, the size of your mailing list isn’t your biggest concern any more.
Now you need a mailing list that generates an RoI because you need to bring in an extra £10k a day in additional profits to cover the cost of sending out a thousand emails a day at a tenner a time.
And if you have a choice between a mailing list that’s met with a wall of indifference every day, and one that’s responsive, which one would you rather have?
Well, it’s a no brainer. The responsive list.
Even if that’s only 100 responsive names instead of 1,000 indifferent names.
The prospect perspective
The other important perspective here is your prospect’s.
It might have been different 20 years ago, but nowadays you’re fooling nobody.
We know the amount of time, effort, and money you spend each day to load up a fresh “Haven’t heard from you yet, Alastair. Are you free on Thursday at 10am or 2pm?” emails is effectively zero.
So we know you don’t care about us, as your prospects, in the slightest.
Pre-email prospecting, we knew it took time and effort to get in your car and drive 50 miles to buy me a coffee.
We knew it was a hassle to clip an article from a magazine, find a stamp and an envelope, and post it on to us.
We knew you might well have better things to do than host us at some event or other.
But we also knew you were putting the effort in.
You were investing in that relationship. If grew to trust the salesperson and thought they offered a decent product, I’d return the favour by giving them a chance to quote for some business.
But I did that because they had invested your time and energy in the relationship between our two companies. And I knew that would have been at a not-insubstantial cost to them in terms of money, time, and effort.
In those settings, the law of reciprocity kicks in and, all things being equal, I would be likely to give you a chance to quote sooner or later.
And if you didn’t, after a while, you’d stop inviting me out for coffee when you were in the neighbourhood, or at least those invitations would become less frequent. Which would be cool too – after all, I know you’ve got a business to run so I can’t expect you to invest time, effort, and money indefinitely without a return.
Sending the same outreach email every day…or worse the “are you free Thursday at 10am or 2pm?” follow-ups…doesn’t activate any of those processes. They don’t deepen relationships. They don’t move you closer to a sale.
No. You’re somewhere on a spectrum between me being indifferent to your messages to me being actively hostile to your business because you’ve turned into a monumental pain in the you-know-where.
There is where managing your bottom line is at least as much art as science.
The science says if we have a cost of £X now, but we can reduce that to 10% of £X by firing all our salespeople and sending out daily emails instead, then we’ve increased our bottom line.
The art says, what really matters is maximising the amount of sales vs the existing cost base – so an “expensive” sales team which makes more sales is better than a cheap or non-existent sales team which doesn’t.
Balancing those two considerations can be tricky. And not always obvious if you operate purely in the realms of science, with cost as your only consideration, without considering the wider processes of making a sale.
However an easy way to get most of the benefit to your bottom line is to pretend things cost you real money, even if they don’t. That forces you to think about the RoI in a way that “it doesn’t cost us anything, so we might as well send today’s batch of 100,000 emails” doesn’t.
Do that, and I can guarantee you’ll make some very different decisions about how to run your business.
And, almost certainly, boost your bottom line in the process.