Many companies struggle with the opening, leading marketing piece. If you have been in sales and marketing for any amount of time, you have received emails or seen brochures that describe offerings in the same tired, flowery language – terms like robust, dynamic, seamless, and integrated are inserted haphazardly without explanation. Many are just plain forgettable – the worst result you can get from a marketing effort.
How can marketers and lead developers create memorable emails and other pieces? I have four tips:
- Lead with a story that includes a scenario with which the reader is familiar.
- Go for the heart by triggering an emotional response.
- Writing skills count.
- Forget the ambiguous, vague and overused words unless you include an explanation.
IntroRocket is one company I have been working with on its initial sales and marketing strategy. I’ve pasted one of IntroRocket’s email marketing piece below. I hope you agree it follows the above four tips.
__________
I have been part of sales organizations for almost 20 years, and have won and lost more deals than I can remember – but will never forget a particular lost sale. As we reviewed the deal near the end of the sales cycle, I learned that our competitor’s salesperson had a personal connection with a major influencer at the prospect, and I understood immediately that the relationship had tipped the scales against us. We hated losing this deal because it was an ideal customer for us. And what we learned in an internal executive review made the loss even more painful: we had our own personal relationship with a key player at the prospect and one of our trusted channel partners knew the CEO. We should have been aware of and leveraged those relationships to win the deal.
This is just one example of “the deal that got away”, and everyone reading this is likely to have similar stories. Your “one that got away” experiences may involve co-worker connections with a product manager, developer, office manager, board member, or CEO. The common denominator is that there are existing relationships in your company network that sales reps are unaware of or fail to leverage – and the result is lost sales.
Start every customer relationship with a personal introduction
We live in The Age of Networking: a time of unparalleled ability to connect with people across multiple networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Salesforce.com. These connections provide businesses with entirely new opportunities to discover relationships that exist between companies and their prospective customers.
But even with these incredible opportunities, many companies struggle to break through traditional barriers to discovering relationships: not all co-workers are directly connected, co-workers rely on multiple networking services such as Facebook and LinkedIn, channel partners may not be part of your networks, etc. Regardless of the specifics, there are trusted relationships and opportunities for personal introductions that exist right now to help build better customer relationships and to close more deals.
People buy from those they know and trust. In today’s world where unsolicited communication is growing exponentially and the effectiveness of traditional marketing is at an all-time low, the value of trusted relationships is at an all-time high. This decade’s most successful companies with be the ones that understand their network of relationships and take advantage of the opportunities for trusted introductions.
Social Networking for Sales
IntroRocket provides Instant “Social Networking for Sales” because we enable companies to tap the value of their company network. We mesh multiple social graphs (LinkedIn now, Facebook soon, webmail later), add intelligence about the quality of relationships, and make it extremely simple to see and benefit from existing co-worker relationships regardless of who at the company has the most relevant and valuable connection.
We connect the dots between co-workers across a company, automatically display connection information inside salesforce.com, and enable employees to engage directly with current and prospective customers via trusted co-worker relationships. The purpose is simple: IntroRocket gives sales people an advantage in their accounts and helps companies close more deals.
Start Ahead, Stay Ahead
If you would like to discuss how you could keep your deals from getting away, please contact me. Until then, please feel free to try IntroRocket free at http://www.introrocket.com/install/.
Michael Leeds
CEO, Founder
Mike at IntroRocket dot com
1.650.468.6901