Hi There.
One of the things we talk about a lot here at Cirrus Insight is what sales professionals can do with the time we create for them.
We think that time can best be spent reinvesting in yourself and learning tactics that can improve your overall sales performance. (Who doesn’t like making extra money?)
But the Internet is loaded with tactics, courses, webinars, books, and other educational content.
So getting started down that road can be a challenge.
What follows are some of the tactics I shared with sales professionals who joined our most recent Email Blast Webinar.
Using any one of these tactics will immediately improve your sales outreach efforts. But using all of them will 10X your outreach efforts if you put the time and effort in to implement them.
And with all the time Cirrus Insight saves you by eliminating manual data entry, making appointment scheduling a breeze, and seeing what your prospects are interested in, and what they’re not, you’ll have plenty of time to implement these tactics.
OK. But How Do You Know What Tactics To Use In The First Place?
What tactics you choose to use are going to be defined by your sales persona. We can’t
stress enough how important researching your customer is before you try any of this.
Think about it like this: How do you save money at the grocery store? You can go in and just grab whatever you, or your kids, want on the shelves. That would be an expensive trip. Or. You can go into the grocery store with a list and know exactly what you need and where to find it.
Targeting your sales persona is no different than having that list from the grocery store.
So, if you haven’t done so already, ask people who fit your target persona about what three problems they have, and then ask yourself if your product can easily solve one of those problems.
If your product can’t, don’t bother those people. Everyone’s busy. Places to be. You know the drill.
But if your product legitimately solves their problem, and does so in such a way that’s easy to understand, easier to use, and won’t break the bank? Then by all means, pitch away!
A Pro-Tip: What customers care about most is price, speed, and convenience. Branding is important. So is trying to achieve a loft mission, like giving every sales professional 20% of their day back.
But don’t fall into the trap of thinking any customer or company has brand loyalty. They don’t. Customers only care about whether or not your product can solve their problem easier, faster, and more efficiently than the competition. And if it can’t, then you need to make sure other aspects of the business are 10X better than the competition’s, such as your customer service and educational offerings.
That is, unless …
You’ve Utilized The 7 Hour Rule
Your goal is to have prospects know you, like you, and trust you.
But what does that even mean?!
For sales professionals, it means the difference between a cold prospect and a warm one. The more time a prospect spends with you, the product, and your company, the warmer they get.
The 7 Hour Rule refers to a number of different theories of attention, and offers a unified hypothesis to sales and marketing professionals. A hypothesis that says, a prospect needs to spend 7 hours worth of time to get warmed up to you and ready to buy.
If you can successfully get a prospect to spend seven hours worth of time with you, then you’ll have begun to establish the kind of brand loyalty or product loyalty that marketers like to talk about.
It’s only after they’ve gone through the seven hours that a prospect will potentially forgive your products shortcomings, or higher price point, because they’ve emotionally invested in you.
(If you think this is a fluff, you can find the seven hour rule across all walks of life, including dating. You need to spend, cumulatively, seven hours with someone before your mind decides if it likes someone enough to date them.)
What Are Some Of These Tactics I Can Use To Get To 7 Hours?
To the surprise of nobody, the answer is content marketing. But don’t worry. Content marketing isn’t this magic, expensive thing you need to hire a fancy consultant to do for you.
Here’s all you, Mrs. and Mr. Sales Professional, need to know about any content you’re going to create for your prospects: Content is good only when it shows someone how to quickly and easily solve a problem they have using your product.
Use the acronym SSTH: As long as you keep the solution to your customer’s problems simple, specific, timely, and honest, they will grow to know, like, and trust you.
Tactic #1 Use LinkedIn To Generate More Sales
- Are you developing your own personal brand on LinkedIn? If not, here’s how to get started:
- Step 1: Identify something you’re passionate about.
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- Step 2: Connect that thing back to the product you’re selling or the industry you serve.
- Step 3: Start posting about the intersection of these two things regularly in your status updates. (For example: I always wanted to write a marketing book that used professional wrestling to teach the concepts, because professional wrestling is something I enjoy and it’s a universally beloved form of entertainment around the world in dozens of different languages. Since marketing is something we all do on this planet, using professional wrestling is an entry point for people who may not know a thing about marketing. What’s your entry point?)
- Why post these status updates? Because this creates an opportunity for your customer to spend time with you. A LinkedIn post is also something you can do from your phone, so the time commitment is minimal and doesn’t require anyone else for you to make it happen.
- Make sure your status updates are posted on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, and only between 8:30 am and 11:30 am EST. You don’t need to post every day, but only post on those days and between those times. If you need help scheduling posts in advance, you can use a tool like CoSchedule to do it for you.
- Pro Tip: You can collect all of your LinkedIn status updates and turn them into a LinkedIn blog post. (If you’re not a writer, you can hire one using a service like Fiverr.)
- One more thing: If you just start posting, nobody’s going to pay attention until the algorithm for LinkedIn recognizes that you’re delivering great content on a reliable schedule. That last part is so, so important. But here’s another thing that’s important: Schedule 15 minutes a day liking and commenting on people’s posts on LinkedIn whose business you’re trying to gain. This will make you visible to them and hopefully trigger them coming back to your profile to see what you’re posting about.
- What I just described above is also the single most effective way to use any social media platform, FYI. So. You’re welcome. :-)
Tactic #2 Video Replies
Something that continues to be underutilized in social media, as well as sales, is video replies: So, take advantage of this opportunity and respond to people using video. This is something you can do on most platforms now because most platforms want you to upload video. Why? Because all they care about is keeping people on their platform. A video reply does just that while also increasing the amount of time a prospect spends with you.
- How does this work? You can record a short, personal video to say hello, or use a program like Loom, and record yourself solving a problem the customer is likely to have that your product can solve. (Hint: If you identified the three problems your target persona has, it should not be hard to do this.)
- Any time someone has a problem with your product, don’t send them an article. Send them a video of yourself solving their problem. People can watch and listen faster than they can read.
- What if you want to send a cold email? Can you use video to liven it up?
- You sure can. You can’t send videos through email without a bunch of technical nonsense. But you CAN create a gif from the video you made using Adobe Express.
- Record yourself saying hello, and leave a link below the gif for the prospect to learn more. Keep these emails short and sweet.
- Pro Tip: YouTube is an excellent resource to learn how to do anything, including glowing up your video production on a tight budget. Take video seriously. Most people don’t and it shows.
- You want your videos to look and sound as good as can be. If you’re going to make a lot of these, consider getting an iPhone and a lavalier microphone you can clip to yourself. You can also consider using a platform like Riverside to record from your phone. (We use Riverside here at Cirrus Insight to record all of our podcasts.)
Tactic #3: Send Email Like It’s 1997
You know what’s crazy?
It’s 2022, and people still don’t take email seriously. That’s despite the fact that 96% of consumers check their email every day and 4.037 billion email users on the planet. Email is not dead.
And with social media algorithmic tomfoolery, email is still the best, most reliable, and consistent way to reach prospects. Real talk for a minute? Email is the best, most reliable, and consistent way to reach anyone on this planet.
The technology that allows email to operate is embedded in every device, even the most basic ones. So learning how to send email properly is going to be more important, not less, as time goes on.
That’s where a product like Cirrus Insight can come. (Did we mention that we offer a risk-free 14-day trial? No credit card required. Just give it a whirl.)
What follows is everything I know about email marketing presented in a short list:
- Always use links instead of attachments. Never send an attachment.
- Make sure you are only pushing one thing per email.
- Make sure you link to that one thing at least 3 times in your email.
- Workshop Your Subject Lines - Keep it to 12 words or less and include an emoji
- Keep the body to 250 words or less. Always less. The fewer words, the better.
- Get rid of the fancy graphic templates and images. Google hates them.
- DO use gifs. One. Max.Like we talked about in Tactic #2
- Every email MUST provide value i.e. be useful and timely to the prospect.
- Never send emails just to “check in” without offering something valuable to the prospect. Send them a video about something your product can do for them that solves a problem or shows off a new, useful feature.
- Want more help with your email? Try out 101 Email Templates blog post.
Wow. We covered a lot here, huh? If you have any marketing questions, you can always reach me at BJMendelson@CirrusInsight.com and I’m happy to answer them here on this blog.
Until then, why don’t you give that free Cirrus Insight trial a whirl and then use the time we save you to put these tacts into practice?