by Will Rotondi
When you’re talking with your prospect on the phone, how often do you let the conversation just sort of…pause? I’ll wager it’s little to none, but please tell me if I’m wrong. Part of this is probably psychological. You may have heard how effective tie-down questions can be in prompting your prospects to agree to your final pitch. But that can also require you to ask a lot of questions, and there’s no telling just how long some of those answers will be. Any dead space can feel like wasted time on the clock.
It’s tempting to do the same thing when you’re prospecting through email, in the form of asking one (or several) questions in a single message. Sales reps who I’ve seen do this have said that they thought these questions added a sense of value and urgency to scheduling a call. It seemed like a completely foreign concept to them to email a prospect and not ask a question, as if that implied they weren’t interested at all. It’s their digital equivalent of dead space.
Try not to fill in that dead space. Here’s why: it’s been our experience with email automation that if you want to encourage your prospects to have a phone call, you have to educate them about your business first. To clarify, I don’t mean selling to them – I mean informing them, like a thought of the day, about what’s going on in their market space, addressing pain points they might be experiencing, and prompting them to click back to your website to learn more. They’re much less inclined to do this when you keep asking them “Do you wanna buy?”, “Can we talk?”, “Are you interested?”, etc.
Informative messages without call-to-action questions will allow you to stay on your prospects’ radar, and allows them to reach out to you on their own terms.
