This sales scenario happens just about every day. So, here’s a trick that will save you time and ensure timelier sales follow up! First I’ll describe the problem situation …
You speak to a prospect or customer and as a result, for whatever reason, you need to follow up with them some specific period of time into the future. You don’t want to forget, so you schedule a reminder call or action for the appropriate point in your calendar and you put useful notes in your activity so you can reference them in your next conversation.
What’s wrong with this situation? Nothing, except that the day you scheduled your timed follow-up activity for is so cluttered with other sales activities that you might overlook it. And, alarming it does no good because you’ve got so many other alarms that they are all falling on deaf ears. So what’s the solution?
The solution is to schedule your follow up as an email so that will go out automatically on the exact date and time you want it to. In other words, I write the actual email when I’m finishing the previous activity, while the comments of my prospect/customer are fresh in my mind, and so that they will resonate even better with my recipient. Here’s an example to show you how it works:
My prospect tells me they have a meeting scheduled for next week Tuesday morning to discuss my offer/product. They say that I should check back in that afternoon. I write my email with words that take advantage of the influence of “commitment and consistency,” (read Robert Cialdani’s book Influence – the Modern Psychology of Persuasion), by saying I’m checking back per their request … and I ask in my message how the meeting went and if they’re ready to speak with me or if they need more time. My message is timely and relevant!
The beauty is that I didn’t have to worry about making or missing my call! My follow up was taken care of automatically, leaving me to push off my “manual” follow up for another week or two. It’s a beautiful thing! But how do you do that with GoldMine you ask?
It’s easy to pre-write emails that go out automatically using a tool called – EmailRush™ by Z-Firm. With EmailRush I simply schedule an “Other Action,” which is just like scheduling a call, and I write my email in the “Notes” of the scheduled activity. Those notes become the body of my email and they’re inserted into a custom HTML email template so it looks great!
You can find dozens of common situations when scheduling emails to go out automatically will work for you. (e.g. event reminders, appointment reminders, expiration notices, etc.) With EmailRush™ I can also leverage the “group scheduling” feature in GoldMine to write a reminder that will go out to a filter/group or tagged list of records.
CRM is supposed to be a “productivity tool,” and it is, if you learn to use techniques like this one. Here a CRM power-user has a competitive advantage because, as we have all heard, “Sales is a contact sport!”
