The Scrambled Egg - a blog every sales professional should wake up to.

 You’ve all had the accounts you tried relentlessly to get into. You call multiple people in the company and try month after month. Many sales people do this as tenacity has great pay offs in sales. Sometimes the technique works and other times it works to no avail. There is a smarter way to work – dump your prospects. Yes, dump them. It’s over. Kaput. It’s not you, it’s me. Done. Adios.

Breaking up is hard to do. It’s even harder when you think of breaking up with a potential customer. Let’s think about it from a different perspective as it might actually yield the opposite result. In other words, breaking up with your prospects is a great strategy to solicit a response.

First, understand your prospects are busy. They have multiple meetings and many things on their plate. They receive many calls throughout the day and while they may plan to call you back, you’re pushed to the bottom of the list. The prospect knows you’re in sales and relies on you to be tenacious and to do your job by continuing to call and email. This allows you to fall further on their “to do” list.

At some point a sales rep will move on and stop calling the prospect without knowing if the prospect might have wanted to connect. So to make matters worse, the sales rep doesn’t communicate to the prospect you’re no longer going to be calling. Don’t make this mistake. This leads us to the first and most basic rule of breaking up.

Here are the rules to a successful breakup:

1) Communicate to the prospect you are giving up. This way they know they can’t rely on you to continue calling and emailing. If they had any interest in speaking you have now forced yourself to the top of the “to do” list because you’ve told you’re breaking up.

2) Do not breakup too soon. If you pull the plug on a prospect without legitimately first putting in effort the tactic seems, well, like a tactic. You should attempt to connect with your prospects at least 8 times (voicemail or email) before breaking up.

3) Include a tease in regards to strategic advice (not about your product or service) you would like to discuss. This will remind them what value they’ll get if they connect with you.

4) Make it short and sweet, but not too sweet. It should be to the point and don’t be abrupt or offensive. This will defeat the purpose and it will again seem like just a tactic.

5) This is the most import of all rules. You’re previous emails should include increasingly valuable information not about your product, service or company (it’s too soon to pitch). In other words, make sure they care you’re breaking up with them. If you’ve provided value in your previous emails they will care that they’re no longer going to receive them. The valuable information also peaked their interest enough to get you onto their “to do” list in the first place. Voicemail and email attempts solely about your products and service will never even get you to the bottom of a “to do” list. This article discusses how to increasingly add value in each effort to reach a prospect.

Here is an example of a breakup voicemail and email script:

Bob,

I wanted to reach out to you one last time. I have suggestions on how your facebook page and website can work harder in terms of generating new business. If I don’t hear back from you, I’ll assume the timing isn’t right.

My information is below should you have any questions.

Best,

Me

The response rate to a breakup is close to 33%. While most responses are positive and they’ll tell you they’ve been meaning to get back to you, sometimes you’ll also get a response from those letting you know they are not interested. A negative response is still as successful breakup. You now have an answer and can move on; it wasn’t meant to be as they were never going to buy anyway. Breaking up isn’t hard to do once the technique proves itself.  Happy selling and breaking up!

Upcoming Articles:

Facebook is Close to Missing the Boat. Why This Will Affect Your Sales. 

Do Territories Matter?

How can you be sure there is a 30% increase? I tested it and measured the results. I took 5 reps as the experimental group. They used the below technique with subsequent emails (which will be a blog post to follow). The control group was the rest of the sales team (about 45 other reps) who continued to use the same templates used in the past. I ran the experiment for 5 weeks and tracked the lead attempt to connect rates in Salesforce. The experimental group made 30% more connects than the control group. In data we trust, even in sales.  So here it goes....

In an early blog post I discuss the #1 rule to consultative selling. The below techniques follow the consultative approach by removing the focus from yourself, your product, company and/or service. 

1) The Subject Line should be about the prospect, not about you. The first step is to get the prospect to open the email. If it’s about them, it’ll be more interesting. If it’s an inbound lead, the subject line should be whatever they downloaded. If it’s an outbound or cold attempt, find something about the prospect. Look to see if they were recently in the news, updated or posted something on LinkedIn or Twitter. Make sure the recent news or status updated is related to business. Then make this the subject line.

2) The Length of the email should be short. Most of us are checking our emails via cell phones and mobile devices can make short emails look long. Send the email to yourself first and make sure it’s not overwhelm in length.

3) The 2 to 1 Ratio. In other words, you should reference their company and/or the word “you” at least twice as many times as you see the word “I” or your company name. Most importantly, start the email with the word “You”. This grabs their attention and it makes it about them. Starting an email with “I” is about you and quite frankly, who cares about you at this point.

4) The Give - you should also offer some type of tease alluding to strategic advice. It's best not criticize; add value by offering strategy and not about your product/service. Each subsequent attempt you’ll offer additional value by giving more strategies. I’ll talk about this more in my next coming blog article. Stay tuned.

5) The Get – the email should end with a call to action that stands alone. In other words, they’ll need to respond in order to get the strategic advice. This does not mean to end the email with “Let me know if you’d like to talk”. It's fine to use this with your friends and they get back to you because they like you. Prospects don’t like sales reps, they are not your friend and this is a waste of time. Instead, be very clear and end the email with a question “What time works best with you” or give suggested times (give a couple options as people are busy).

Here is an example of an email/voicemail template:

Bob,

You recently downloaded the whitepaper “Using Facebook for Business”. I've been to your website and your business Facebook page and noticed a few areas where you can increase the amount of business you’re generating from social media.

Would you be able to connect Monday at 1:00 EST or Tuesday at 11:00 EST?

Best,

Me

Your voicemail will match the same format, except you’d add at the end “This is (your name) calling from (company name) and my number is ____“. Yes, at the end not the beginning. As soon as you start a voicemail with “Hi this is so and so from…..” the voicemail is deleted before you can say the company name. If you have to introduce yourself, they know it’s a sales call and they won’t listen. Delete. Starting the voicemail without an introduction will seem very awkward at first. Practice until a it’s habit.

While many of these methods were derived from Jeff Hoffman's Basho Strategies, they've been augmented over time to stay relevant with the changing landscape of sales.