Selling in a Recession: The Value of E-Mail

During a recession you not only have to compete against your regular competitors, you must also fight the most dreaded enemy of all—no decision! During tough economic times the only thing you can count on is that you’re going to have to work three times as hard to close the same amount of business as before. Therefore, you must ramp up your prospecting efforts accordingly. 

But what is the best strategy to you penetrate new accounts? Prospective customers rarely return cold calls and sending letters usually fails to generate results. Today, the best method to reach new prospects is e-mail because they create immediate interest. Moreover, e-mails that are sent to executive leaders can be easily forwarded to mid-level managers and lower level evaluators for follow up.

The structure of your e-mail is critical to driving the prospect to respond. While the goal of your e-mail is introduce your company and its products, the underlying message should be about “value.” The perceived value of a product depends on the psychological, political, operational, and strategic value it provides to decision makers.  

At the root of every decision is one of four psychological values. People buy products they believe will help them fulfill deep-seated psychological needs: satisfying the ego, being accepted as part of a group, avoiding pain, and ensuring survival. All the other outward appearances of a customer’s decision-making process--the analysis, return-on-investment calculations, and other internal studies--are the means to achieving an overriding psychological goal. Therefore, the psychological value is most important when it comes to purchasing decisions and should be a key theme within your e-mail. 

The second most important value, political value, involves organizational power. Your product may enable a vice president to consolidate his or her power, help a low level employee become indispensable to the company, allow a departmental manager to satisfy an internal powerbroker, or enable a leader to maintain authority. Your product can make someone more powerful, or for those seeking power, it can provide much-needed visibility that enables them to be in contact with the company’s powerbrokers. 

The third most important value is operational value. People’s success in an organization is dependent upon the success of their department’s operations. Therefore, every department has inherent pressure to accomplish projects that successfully add operational value. The ways that operational value are determined is quite diverse. An ambitious project leader might consider your product’s operational value the ability to successfully complete his project on time. For a manager concerned about being laid off, you’re your operational value might be that your product enables the department to proliferate its services throughout the company, thereby making him indispensible. Satisfying internal customers in other departments might be the operational value for an underperforming departmental manager.

Strategic value, the fourth value, is based upon the appearance of rationality and impartiality. However, customers do not seek information that will help them make an objective strategic decision; they amass information that helps them justify their preconceived ideas of strategic value. In other words, your product’s strategic value comprises the reasons and arguments evaluators give to senior management and the other areas of the company as to why the product should be purchased regardless if they are real or imagined. Seven types of strategic value enable customers to

·         Gain a competitive advantage (increase market share, enter new markets, defeat competition)

·         Increase revenues

·         Decrease costs

·         Increase productivity and efficiency

·         Improve customer satisfaction

·         Improve quality

·         Standardize operations (increase ease of business)

                 

E-mail messages should be based upon these four values. You must communicate to potential buyers that you can help solve critical department problems, help them become experts and an internal source of knowledge. For example, here’s an e-mail (mass-market campaign) targeted at the automobile industry.

Subject:  How Toyota Maintains Its Critical Relationships

Dear Mark, 

Q. How do Toyota, Ford, and Honda maintain near-perfect dealer relationships?

A. XYZ Corporation has helped them automate and streamline all aspects of partner communications. As a result, they have increased revenues, accelerated time to market, and improved dealer communications.   

For example, Toyota distributes thousands of unique messages and memorandums to its worldwide dealer distribution channel on a daily basis. Toyota has drastically reduced turnaround times while increasing customer service and loyalty using XYZ’s solution. 

For a free dealer communication analysis or to learn how we can improve and standardize relationships with all your important business partners, please call or e-mail me at your earliest convenience.

Thank you,

John Johnson

The most important aspect of this e-mail is the psychological impression it creates on the reader. One reader might envision starting a grand project like Toyota’s for his own personal gain. Another might want more information so he could impress others with his expertise. Someone else might have thought, “If it is good enough for Toyota, it should work for us.” Finally, a bureaucratic manager might be excited about standardizing all the various communications the company must send to their partners. The psychological storyline of the e-mail speaks to different types of buyers.

In order to create your e-mail you should conduct research to determine what the psychological, political, operational, and strategic value are. Obviously, you want to study the company’s web site and their financial reports. However, there is another fantastic resource that I use which is quite unique called Zoominfo (If you are not familiar with it I recommend you visit www.zoominfo.com). While there are a variety of prospecting databases available, Zoominfo’s data is different. It not only allows you to research companies and find key decisionmakers, it also provides a profile for that person that can’t be found anywhere else. It does this by combing the internet for all information about a particular person and then combining it into an easily accessible, meaningful format.

For example, the other day I had a conference call with a vice president of sales for a software company whom I had never met. In order to prepare for the call I visited his company’s web site but there wasn’t any profile information about him there. On Zoominfo I found his job history, several articles that he was quoted in, his compensation, a presentation he gave at a user conference, and even where he went to college. This information was invaluable in crafting the themes and “values” I would discuss with him (just as I would have included in an introductory e-mail).  

Remember, every prospective customer, from the executive leaders to lower level employees, have different motivations and different perceptions of a product’s true value. More than ever, it is critical that the storyline of your introductory e-mails speak each type of value. By doing so, you will be able to refill that pipeline of deals that is continually being depleted because the customer made “no decision.”  

Other Articles that Might Interest You:

The Best Recession Sales Strategy

Recession Sales Strategies: You Must Have a Spy!

Comments

[Dr. Jim Anderson]

Steve: good post - email is a tool, and just like any other tool it can be powerful when used correctly.

I believe that the $1,000,000 real estate in an email is the subject. If you don't get this right and make it so compelling that your recipient just has to read the email, then it will probably get deleted.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
www.TheAccidentalNegotiator.com
"Learn The Secrets of Side-By-Side Negotiating To Get The Most Value Out Of Every Negotiation"

[CRM Solutions]

Yeah, that's 100% true. Just blindly putting up some words in the Subject box results in blindly deleting up the email. Effective email is a must for running a successful business.

[Matt]

Great post.

Email is an excellent first touch - in fact I haven't used letters as a marketing tool in years.

One email tactic I have used with good success is a relevant quote, highlighted, at the head of the email. Like voicemail, I like a vague subject line.

[Dinesh Kandanchatha]

I think a lot of sales people are reactive in their use of email. Email can also be used as a very effective relationship building tool. One idea I use in my sales team is nurturing emails that are sent periodically (monthly or quarterly) based on prospect attributes (ie. industry, gender, etc). Marketing has a responsibility to understand the key verticals in each geographic territory and find relevent information for their prospects in that vertical which is sent on behalf of the sales rep. The rep then is able to nurture a relationship with many prospects with targeted relevent information. The idea is to keep many prospects on simmer and as business conditions change, you will be top of mind to contact. Great post.

Dinesh Kandanchatha
Blog:http://www.mysticselling.com

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