Continuing on with yesterday’s theme of conflicting perspectives, I want to talk about selling. Specifically, let’s talk about selling via email.
Hey! You sell stuff over email sometimes!
You’re right, italicized font. And that’s a distinction I want to draw — I want to speak about offers, proposals, and opportunities you’re really trying to make one-to-one.
Scenario: You just met with someone who is a potential client. Or maybe you’re putting on an event and they are a potential sponsor of that event. You’re excited, you think it’s a great fit, you just need to make the final offer and get them on board.
You sit down at your laptop, spend thirty minutes crafting the perfect email. You show how excited you are to have met them, and how great this opportunity is going to be, and why they should be just as excited as you are, and the only thing left is to commit to $XXX.
You read it through a couple of times, you’re proud of it — no typos and it perfectly outlines why this is a great fit. You hit send.
At this moment, our mind thinks, “They are going to be at their desk, they are going open this and read through my thoughts and get excited and get on board!”
And when that doesn’t happen, they don’t respond or they send a super short response of “no thanks” or “not yet” — we ask ourselves why didn’t that email work? What happened??
The problem is you cannot control how or when that email was received. It would be great if they were sitting back, relaxed, had a ton of time to read thoroughly and were in a great mood.
But that’s almost never the case, and so your energy may not come through. They may be between meetings, scrolling through their exploding inbox just trying to mark as many emails “read” as possible before heading into their next meeting (which they are already thinking about and not actually reading your email).
Offers are much better served in a setting where you have someone’s full attention and you can create more control over how (and when) your message is received. Not only that, but there are physical and verbal cues to see how they are receiving your message, you can tailor it on the spot, and have a much more human connection.
I love email, I love text communication, but getting on the phone or sitting down with someone goes a whole lot farther and often in the same amount of time (or less!).