In this week’s Sales Buzz Ezine:

I received a sales email this week and you really need to see it...

Sales Prospecting Email – Did your business send this to me

This is important if your company sent this email or if you know who did.

This is a real mail that I received from a company trying to arrange a meeting with me. I’ve deleted the company name to save any embarrassment.

Hello Stephen,

Good morning.

Hope you have received my previous email.

I would like to briefly introduce my agency, **********, to you. We are a digital/creative marketing solutions agency, with our UK offices based in London and Leeds. We have excellent expertise in video production, photography, catalogues, web development, application development as well as marketing/advertising consultancy services.

********** is 7 years old and is already growing in stature and experience as a result of current relationships with Unilever, Rentokil Initial, Argos, Lenovo, ING, Mphasis and many more global clients. We have successfully aligned our cloud business model to be able to handle SME clients, just as well as the larger MNE clients.

We recently acquired our sister Agency *****, to increase our UK presence and capacity to deliver the highest quality services at the best prices for our customers.

Follow all of the latest goings on at Twitter, Facebook, our Blog and please do not hesitate to call if you have any further queries or requests.

I would be delighted if we could set up a meeting or telecom to discuss your requirements and any opportunities there may be, to work together.

Thank you very much.

Have a great day!

So what do you think?

A good sales email, letter, or phone call, should grab your attention with a snappy opening that hooks you in because it connects with you. It should give you a reason to read more. It could use a big claim, something important, tell the buyer they are missing out or could gain a benefit.

The opening line:

The opening line: ‘Good morning. Hope you have received my previous email.’

Did that grab your attention. Probably not.

On a busy day, whether this was a phone call, a letter, or an email, most buyers would delete it, bin it, or put the phone down.

I don't recall any previous emails but even if I had that's no way to get my attention.

At the top of this ezine I used the headline asking if you sent me this email.

Then I followed it with an introduction line saying:

If your business sent this prospecting email to me you have got serious problems.

That was just to hook your attention. Did that work any better.

Hold their interest:

After the introduction, where you have grabbed the buyer’s attention, there should be a line to hold their interest. This can be an interesting fact, a potential benefit, a solution, a connection with the reader or listener.

The next line in the email was: I would like to briefly introduce my agency...

Interesting? I think not. The paragraph continues with information about the seller’s organisation.

My next line at the top of this ezine is:

This is important if your company sent this sales prospecting email to me or you know who did.

I tried to make it personal so I asked if your company had sent it.

I wanted to make it hold your interest so I used the word important. My aim was to get you to read on, and I guess I did or you wouldn’t be reading this line, so I created a situation where you wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

You probably wanted to know what it was that was serious for the sender, if you knew the sender, or whether your company had sent it.

The body of the sales prospecting email:

The rest of the email is all about them and nothing about me or any benefits I may gain from talking to them. By the end of the email I know all about their history but little about what they do, let alone what they could do for me.

Even the description of their business tells me nothing:

We are a digital/creative marketing solutions agency.

Does that tell me what they do, no not really. So if you received a prospecting email, a letter, or a phone call that followed the same pattern as this one would you read or listen to the whole pitch?

What structure should an Introduction follow

A cold telephone call to a prospective customer is one of the best examples of how to introduce you and what you could offer to a customer. If you have a structure for a cold call you can use it on email, letter, and even on adverts. Take a look at the introduction my teams use at Cold call scripts...

I'm Stephen Craine from the website Sales-Training-Sales-Tips.com

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