How to Eliminate the Sales/Marketing Disconnect With CRM-FM Read More >>
80% of Sales Lead Generation Costs Wasted Due to Lack of Lead Development Read More >>
Sales-Optimizing On-Demand CRM Marketing Campaigns, With CRM-FM Read More >>
Where On-Demand CRM Meets Marketing: What Marketers Need to Know Read More >>

MAKE SURE YOU CONTINUE TO RECEIVE EACH ISSUE OF TUESDAY MARKETING NOTES—CLICK HERE TO RENEW YOUR FREE SUBSCRIPTION (NOTE:IF YOU'VE ALREADY SIGNED UP TO RECEIVE TMN, NO NEED TO SIGN UP AGAIN.)

Relevant Marketing Deliverables: Developing
Sales-Generating E-Mail Message Templates for Your Sales Team’s Document Library

by Eric Gagnon

When it comes to meeting the goal of addressing the prospect’s real-world product concerns, the irrelevancy and lack of effectiveness of company marketing materials is one of the common complaints we hear from B2B salespeople when they talk to us about their company’s marketing programs.

According to a 2004 study by The Aberdeen Group, salespeople spend 40 to 60 hours each month re-creating or reworking their company’s marketing material to make it more effective for their selling purposes.

As marketing professionals, we obviously want to prevent this situation from happening in our own companies. One of the best ways to make our program’s marketing deliverables more relevant and effective to our sales team’s selling tasks is to develop marketing templates for the common types of marketing deliverables used across the many scenarios encountered by our sales teams—in print, by e-mail, and in other electronic formats. These templates are usually stored in a document library of your company’s CRM system or a commonly-accessible file server, for ready access by your company’s sales team.

Developing E-Mail Templates for Your Sales Team’s Document Library

This week, we’ll cover some of the keys to developing and implementing e-mail templates, used primarily by your sales team in your lead development program, to communicate with their prospects and build the case for your product, over time, as the best solution to the prospect’s business problem or issue.

Of course, the quality and relevance of the content you utilize in your e-mail communications—messages, white papers, technical documents, applications histories, etc.—is the most important factor that determines the effectiveness of your lead development program. Because it lacks the substance and solidity of a printed mailing piece or brochure, and because prospects receive scores of e-mail messages each day in addition to the e-mails they receive from your company, e-mail is an inherently weak form of marketing communication.

Much also depends on the care and consideration you put into the planning and execution of your e-mail messaging program, by taking care not to send too many e-mails to your prospects beyond their tolerance level, and seeing your e-mail messages through the eyes of your prospects.

Personal “Spot” Sales Rep E-Mail Templates

Once your company’s sales rep establishes contact with the prospect, and begins to exchange e-mails with your company’s rep, this personal “spot” communications between your company’s sales team and their prospects becomes a very important part of the lead development process.

While this communication goes on largely without involvement by you as a field marketing professional, you can play an important role here by:

• Developing and maintaining a library of e-mail message templates and voice mail scripts for a wide variety of sales scenarios and product issues your sales reps can use to communicate with and respond to their prospects;

• Developing a library of useful marketing collateral and relevant materials,
including competitive comparison charts, articles, trade publication reviews of your company’s products, case studies, and other material that can help sell your product;

• Communicating upcoming e-mail messaging promotions in your lead development program to your company’s sales reps so they can tell their prospects to look out for this material, and following up with them to answer additional questions or provide more information as needed

E-Mail Message Templates for Every Selling Situation

Here are some of the advantages of using templates for e-mail messages:

• E-Mail sales message templates save time and avoid repetitive effort: By storing all of your company’s proven and useful sales message templates in one place, document libraries in your company’s on-demand CRM system help your sales team save time and become more efficient in their e-mail communication with prospects. Your sales reps save time by not having to draft a new e-mail message from scratch when a previously-written template can serve just as well, and your entire sales team knows where to find the messages they need for their most common types of responses and communications with their prospects;

• E-mail templates help you retain and share proven communications with your sales team: Building a sales message template library helps you gather and retain the best, most effective sales communication already written by (or for) your sales team, and helps to share the sales messages that have already been proven effective in common, previously-encountered selling situations, events, and scenarios;

• E-mail templates insure consistent communications between sales reps and their prospects: The most important reason to utilize sales letter message templates is to insure consistent, high-quality “messaging” between your sales team and their prospects. Over time, it’s likely you will be able to build an extensive library of sales letters for use in your company’s on-demand CRM document library to address most of the common scenarios your sales team encounters with prospects throughout the sales cycle. When your sales reps are able to pull a well-written letter template that’s been proven effective in a similar sales situation, they improve the quality of their communication with their prospect, and they reduce the risk of communicating incomplete, non-responsive, or unpersuasive information to the prospect that comes from a dashed-off message or reply.

Sales Letter and Message Template Examples

You can create and compile e-mail sales letters, messages, and other customizable sales communication for a wide variety of selling events and scenarios faced by your company’s sales team. Examples of semi-customizable sales letter templates include:

• Post phone call re-cap note describing how your company’s product
contributes to solving the prospect’s problem or business issue;

• E-mail messages to follow-up a sales rep’s phone call, to verify discussion
of a commonly-asked question, issue, or objection concerning your company’s product. A responsive, well-written message that helps neutralize a prospect’s objection reinforces the statements made by the rep in their phone call with the prospect, helps to neutralize the prospect’s objection or concern, and moves the sales dialogue closer to the prospect’s buying decision;

• Attachment notes to accompany electronic-format marketing deliverables, such as white papers, eBooks, case studies, applications, briefs, etc. providing overview and summarizing key benefits found in each to the prospect;

• Notes to accompany trade publication news articles covering your
company or product;

• Notes to accompany transmission of responsive attachments to common
prospect requests: RFPs, proposals, price quotes, etc.;

• Sales note providing an overview and key benefits of a new product price
promotion;

• Heads-up note alerting the prospect to an upcoming trade show
appearance and invitation to related company-sponsored event at the show;

• Months-later “touching-base” note to follow up and gauge interest with a
prospect who previously indicated they were not ready to buy in the near or mid-term

Guidelines for Writing E-Mail Sales Letter Templates

Where previous examples of effective e-mail sales letters are not available, you will often have to write your own and upload them to your CRM system’s document library or the sales team's file server. Here are some guidelines for writing e-mail message templates:

Subject lines: At the top of your template file, put in a suggested Subject: line for your sales rep to use as they fill in and customize the e-mail message. Make sure the prospect knows the e-mail is from your sales rep, and that the subject addresses the content of the message.

Sales message template body: Because of its nature as a communications medium, and the short attention spans of most of your busy prospects these days, keep the body of your e-mail messages short: Three or four paragraphs is ideal, but no more than 4-6 medium sized paragraphs. Any message that needs to be longer than this is more important than an informal e-mail message and should be sent as an attachment in a Word doc, a .PDF file, or other attached document for offline reading outside of the prospect’s e-mail application.

Message opening paragraph: If following up a phone call that just occurred, open the e-mail by summarizing the topic and stating its purpose, to provide context for the message, to document responsiveness, and to attract interest in the message:

Dear Tom:

Following up our phone call, here’s more information on our new ad promotion for the Tratex 8404 sleeve lining fixture:

Wherever possible, and especially when listing feature or benefit points, keep your message points to brief, bulleted items to enhance their readability in the body of the e-mail message:

• Nationwide mailing to 15,000 industrial suppliers nationwide: We will send our detailed product sales kits will be sent to the top nationwide distributors, supply houses, and independent rep firms nationwide. [YOUR COMPANY] contact information can be printed on this mailing so prospects can contact you for further product information;

• Print advertising in Manufacturing Today: We will be running a full-page advertising program, starting in September for Tratex sleeve lining fixtures in Manufacturing News and Machine Age Weekly. We can feature [YOUR COMPANY] in the “further information” box at the bottom of these ads.

Sales message close: Close your message by moving to the “next steps”—the next phone call to discuss terms, the next followup to check on the status of the proposal, or the next scheduled meeting with the prospect. Don’t ever miss an opportunity to move the prospect further along in the lead development process by mentioning what comes next:

As we discussed, I’ll follow up with you next Thursday at 9:30 AM to answer any questions you might have.
Thanks,
Bill

This is just a basic illustration, and it’s likely your sales team already has dozens of excellent examples that can serve as useful templates for communications by your company’s sales reps with their prospects. Creating and maintaining this document library is a major first step to making your company’s marketing deliverables and content—and your role in developing this content—more useful and relevant to your company's sales team.

 

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@businessmarketinginstitute.com

Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), a director with the Business Marketing Institute, is author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook and The CRM Field Marketing Handbook, and president of GAA ( http://www.realmarkets.net ), a marketing, sales turnaround, and product development consulting firm.