Initial Outreach: emails or Cold Calls?

I have heard many sales leaders tell me that sales reps prefer email because prospects are too busy to take the call in the first place. They claim that most prospects don’t want to talk on the phone. Email is non-threatening they say. Prospects can reply when they want to, and that way they don’t have to have a conversation on the spot. The hypothesis continues with email giving the prospect more freedom and choice.

Yes. All true. In fact, email allows the prospect so much choice that their usual choice is to delete or ignore (email outreach has a response rate of .03 percent). But nonetheless, email tools marketers tell us about the fantastic ROIs attainable through email and one would never argue that fact based on the ridiculously cheap cost of a broad email marketing campaign. Even if you sold just one thing for $1,000, your ROI could be as high as 500%.

I have nothing against emails except the impact that initial outreach emails have on sales. And, that impact is all negative. It appears that the modern sales rep has determined through this inundation of positive email marketing narrative, that email is the best way to reach prospects and is now relying on email almost exclusively as a first outreach attempt.

The intrinsics of email fit firmly within the modern sales rep’s social ethos. Most of today’s reps were raised in a world dominated by social media and digital communications. I work with a brilliant young marketing professional who tells me that she almost never has a live conversation with any of her peers because that sort of thing is reserved exclusively for moments of crisis, and that she is far more comfortable as are all her friends with along series of texts.

The lovely thing about texting and digital communications is that there are no awkward moments when one or the other party must figure out how to politely advance the conversation or end the call. In digital, one may simply not respond or instead type “TTYL, I’m Driving”

So, why then would you give your prospects the same ability to blow you off entirely, send you to spam or just ignore your initial outbound outreach when catching them live on the phone essentially traps them into at least listening for a few seconds before they blow you off and maybe even allocating another few seconds to you in case you actually said something interesting to them during the first few seconds?

Here are the facts;

1.      The average office worker receives around 121 emails per day and 57 percent of people who receive a cold email think it is spam without even opening the email. With that much noise and that much automatic rejection, no matter how clever your subject line is crafted and even with highly personalized messages, it’s hard to rise above the noise and get someone’s attention.

2.      Creating personalized emails by hand takes 30 minutes on average per prospect which includes a lot of careful research both on the open web and through multiple sources like CrunchBase, Bloomberg and LinkedIn. I know this because my team has done it. If you have hundreds of prospects, that’s a hard way to make a living.  

3.      Artificial Intelligence bots creating personalized emails from web scrapes is a compelling notion in that it requires zero labor on behalf of the sales rep, but the downside is the substantial risk that a comms error could turn brand awareness into brand avoidance. One such provider recently offended a major prospect by congratulating them on their Founder’s passing.

4.      Phone outreach has a response rate of 8.1 percent, compared to .03 percent for email, according to a recent study by Salesforce. That is a 27X difference in performance!

Intuitively, we all know that nothing of value can be sold via the Internet or over email, and that the most effective communication in real-life happens voice to voice, even in my young Marketer’s digital world. But if we judge from the research, there are various types of comms that have various impacts and when used as a part of an integrated marketing strategy, all of them are useful.

The facts are that a phone call will get someone’s attention much quicker than an email, and on a phone call one is able to customize one’s sales pitch to suit the circumstance. Naked phone calls on the other hand, are no where near as effective as those in which a sales rep has some prospect intelligence upon which to begin and continue that initial conversation. This why today, most sales reps spend so much time in pre-call research on social media sites such as LinkedIn trying to accumulate as much information as possible about their prospect, their role and the company being targeted.

Because when one has amassed that intelligence, one has a far better chance of connecting with the trust receptors of the prospect who also went to school at Villanova when coach Massimino led the basketball team to the 1985 NCAA championship. Knowing that the prospect is a hoops fan and a Nova grad is far more effective in a conversation than in an email message that will likely never get read.

But email is extremely effective in nurturing the prospect after the initial phone call is made. At our company, we believe strongly in the principle of “outreach with value” and we never send follow-up emails that probe into our prospects’ wellbeing with innocuous and annoying questions like, “So, how are you doing this week? Have you given any further thought to our last conversation?”

In order to be effective as an interest and relationship nurturing device, every follow-up email must contain some added value that can increase the prospect’s trust in the sales rep’s intentions. No one admires a sales rep who demonstrates clearly that they are only interested in a short term transactional outcome without regard for the prospect’s wellbeing or long-term satisfaction through a considered problem solution.

Even though prospects understand that the sales rep’s goal is to sell the product or service s/he represents, those reps who bother to seek empathy with their prospects’ circumstance will garner a deeper respect and a basis for a trusted relationship than one based solely on the size of the commission. Outreach follow-on emails sent with purpose and in a proper cadence are extremely effective in moving that relationship first ignited with a discovery phone call toward the end result of a closed sale.

So, increasing sales through email marketing as a vehicle for delivering valuable content to your potential clients is a no brainer. Way back in 2013, the Relevancy Group reported that companies which sent videos as part of their emails had their revenues increased by 40%. In 2018, with the ubiquity of Youtube, Facebook Live, and overall video content this percentage is certainly much higher.

Sending along relevant eBooks, white papers, and other digital content in a sequenced follow-on email campaign is an extremely effective way of adding value to your prospect’s journey as s/he goes about the business of examining all the potential solutions to their problem. The more value you can add along the way, the better the relationship evolves, and the higher the potential you have for winning the ultimate deal.

But as a tool for the initial outreach, email is just as ineffective as it is economical.