In the past I shared some tips when you are cold-calling a customer. Cold-calling gets a bad rap. But it can be effective – if it’s done well, targeted and you do your homework beforehand. I also find that cold-calling can be made more effective when you send an email first to warm-up your prospect beforehand.

But even when you do that, rejection is bound to happen. In the event that you have the
right contact info, your prospect is still there and you happen to catch him, he might still flat-out reject you.

So today I want to talk about what sales people can do when they get rejected. I won’t get credit for this – I just witnessed this in a call from Ian, with Vidyard, a company specializing in on-line video. So thank you, Ian, for the inspiration. Interestingly enough, Ian doesn’t sport a “sales” title. But after all, we’re all in sales, aren’t we?…

Email is a necessary evil these days. It’s the most widely used form of communication across companies, and yet precisely because of that widespread use, most people’s inboxes are cluttered with messages.

So, along the way we’ve invented labels, folders, SPAM filters, rules, stars, flags, smart algorithms and more as different ways to prioritize your inbox.

But none of that helps salespeople stay on top of customer communications easily, because they were not designed specifically for salespeople. One of our CRM customers was recently telling us that about 60% of the email their salespeople get is NOT related to the deals he is working on. We know, too, from our own experience that a high percentage of the emails that our sales team gets is not directly related to the deals they are working on.

So we decided to look at this from a fresh perspective, and we asked ourselves one question: Who knows best about the deals you are working on?…