Rounding up the latest in sales research and innovation.
November 20, 2020
Once a month, Maestro Mastery assembles the most important headlines for you. This year, Black Friday has come early, at least to email inboxes. How can your organization cut through the noise?
Step one to getting your email read is getting it opened, which depends on having a good subject line. Copyblogger breaks down the current best practices for email subject lines, including length, compelling word choices, and A/B testing ideas. Some of their suggestions are a bit clickbaity for my taste (feel free to share your thoughts on email subject lines in our comments section below).
You want the recipient to know why they should open your email, so directness is great. I love the way one of our Maestro trainers put it in our Effective Emails training recently. “Why should they want to talk to you? Think about the sentence ‘This email is about [the value we can bring you],’ then just delete the words ‘This email is about’ and you have your subject.”
Once they open the email, directness remains powerful. Last week I read a great, candid conversation about email from the Raising the Bar podcast. In it, Mark Cuban talks about how to build interest when you’re cold emailing C-level decision-makers. The basic idea: get to the point and clearly describe what differentiates your offering. Vague + sounds too good to be true = deleted.
Finally, if people are opening and reading your email, they might schedule a discovery call or demo (or do whatever it is your CTA is asking for). From that initial engagement to becoming a high-quality paying customer is another journey. Chili Piper is offering a free, downloadable e-book with an in-depth look at conversion rates for various sales, marketing, and advertising customer-acquisition efforts.
Delivering on your promises is essential to a professional reputation and is a major focus area for mitigating risk. Our readers who are in retail know how crazy things have been this year and can expect that the next two months of heightened shopping and shipping activity around the holidays will be even more crazy. MIT Technology Review has an interesting short piece on how Chinese e-commerce giants have been retraining their AI prediction models. McKinsey, meanwhile, digs into how interrupted supply chains impact all sorts of businesses in a podcast.
But changes to how we work are also affecting digital businesses. Even if you don’t have a physical supply chain to get interrupted, sales teams often relied on large industry events to build the pipeline. Methods of connecting with customers are continually changing. Video can make it complex to coordinate meetings with large teams of people, but may make it easier to connect with people who were previously inaccessible because of location or schedule. Getting your technology working right is more essential than ever.
It’s a great climate right now for going digital with things that used to involve more physical contact, which means opportunity for many SaaS B2B startups. As a recent piece in Harvard Business Review points out, you may also want to reconfigure sales strategy with an eye to how people and businesses are changing their purchasing habits. And don’t forget physical items in your sales gifting practices—though shipping may be unreliable or overloaded.
Reach out to mastery@maestrogroup.co to put the latest sales tips and tricks to work for your team.
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